I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and join the A.F. of L. The word “author” carries no sanctity with me:  I have read too many of them.  If their forming a trade union will better the output of American literature I am keen for it.  I know that the professional reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which distorts his vision.  Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history, poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of things that aren’t so.  Every crank’s whim, every cretin’s philosophy, is fired at him first of all.  Every six months comes in the inevitable treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John.  And with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg.

Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors.  There is all too little clannishness among us.  We who are the helpless target for the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on foolscap—­might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging anecdotes?  No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of intercourse.  Perpend, brothers!  Let us order a tierce of malmsey and talk it over!  Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of substantial advantage.  Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week?  Let us make sixty the minimum—­or let there be a pogrom among the authors!

WILLIAM McFEE

    M’Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers.  If the leg of a
    cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it,
    and half the ship has to clean up the mess.

    —­RUDYARD KIPLING.

The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and William McFee as chief engineer.  They might add Don Marquis as deck steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess.  Then I would like to be at Raymond and Whitcomb’s and watch the clerks booking passages!

William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer in Mr. Kipling’s Brugglesmith, but I feel sure that his attitude toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same.  Unhappily I do not know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his feelings as a writer, his love of honourable and honest work, his disdain for blurb and blat.  And by an author’s attitude toward the purveyors of publicity, you may know him.