Page:Last essays - 1926.djvu/19

Rh a warm affection, and when, in the September Blue Peter of 1923, there was issued a coloured illustration of the Torrens, he willingly consented to give a personal remembrance of her in the next number. The last words, in which he describes her end upon the shores of the Mediterranean, possess a rare and pensive beauty, which I recover in the following paragraph:

“But in the end her body of iron and wood, so fair to look upon, had to be broken upI hope with fitting reverence; and as I sit here, thirty years, almost to a day, since I last set eyes on her, I love to think that her perfect form found a merciful end on the shores of the Sunlit Sea of my boyhood’s dreams, and that her fine spirit has returned to dwell in the regions of the great winds, the inspirers and companions of her swift, renowned, sea-tossed life which I, too, have been permitted to share for a little while.”

"Christmas Day at Sea" was published in the London Daily Mail on December 24, 1923. It was concerned largely with an episode on one Christmas Day during Conrad’s first voyage to Australia in the Duke of Sutherland in 1879, where he served as an A. B.

"Ocean Travel" made its first appearance in the London Evening News of May 15, 1923, where it was named “My Hotel in Mid-Atlantic.” It was written during Conrad’s voyage to America in the Tuscania in the spring of that year, and was posted to me the moment he arrived in New York. It compares the old and the new life at sea, and, needless to say, the vote of affection is given for the old.

"Outside Literature,” a short essay dealing with the subject of notices to mariners, appeared under the title “Notices to Mariners" in the Manchester Guardian of December 4, 1922, and under its proper title in the American Bookman of February, 1923.