a red breast and greenish-khaki body would hop, not fly, across the floor of the kitchen between the waiting cats. The cats would avert their glances, pulsing their sheathed claws in and out. The robin would hop through the inner doorway of the kitchen, across an angle of the low dining-room and so up the bedroom stairs. When the maid with the morning letters and the tea tray opened the bedroom door the robin would fly through the low, dark room and perch on a comb, stuck into a brush on the dressing table, against the long, low, leaded windows. It awaited crumbs of bread and tiny morsels of lump sugar from the tea tray. It had never been taught to go on these adventures. This robin attended at the opening of the first letter that, more than a quarter of a century ago, the writer received from Joseph Conrad. The robin watched with its beady eyes the sheet of blue-grey paper with the large rather ornamental handwriting. . . . It was afterwards drowned in a cream jug which took away from its aspect of a supernatural visitant.

Above the large kitchen was the large Men's Room where the hinds of the farm had been used to sleep. It was entered by a ladder which was removed at night so that the hinds should not murder the farmer or do worse to the farmer's

wife. The low windows of this low room were leaded in diamond shapes, the glass frosted with the green of great age. One of these windows had inscribed upon it, no doubt by a diamond, the name John Kemp and the date 1822. Conrad always objected to John Kemp as a name not sufficiently aristocratic for the hero of "Romance", who was the grandson of an earl, but the writer liked it and it remained so in the book.

Years before that, looking through the pages of Dickens's "All the Year Round" for woodcuts contributed by Ford Madox Brown, upon whose biography he had been engaged, the writer had come upon a short rendering of the official account of the trial of Aaron Smith. This had been the last trial for piracy that had ever been held at the Old Bailey and the prisoner was acquitted. The story told by him in the dock was sufficiently that of "Romance", as it now stands. It struck the writer at once after the reading of the first few paragraphs-that here indeed was what we used to call a subject, with a tone of voice as if the word had been italicised. For certain subjects will grip you with a force almost supernatural, as if something came from behind the printed, the written or the spoken word, or from within the aura of the observed incident in actual life,

and caught you by the throat, really saying: "Treat me." So in the dusky air of the British Museum Reading Room, whilst that first perusal was being made, it was almost as if the genie of the place exclaimed, "Treat this subject." If you do it will mean fortune; if not, lifelong ill-luck. It brought fortune.

The first treatment of that story by the writer was of an incredible thinness. It was like the whisper of a nonagenarian and the writer had tried to make it like the whisper of a nonagenarian. It was finished just before, in 1898 or so, Conrad first came to see the writer at Limpsfield. . . Why the writer should ever have thought of writing of pirates, heaven knows, or why, having determined to write of pirates it should have been his ambition to treat them as if in terms of a very faded manuscript of a Greek play! But that was certainly his ambition and, as it proved, his ambition was certainly granted to him to achieve. Every sentence had a dying fall and every paragraph faded out. The last sentences of that original draft ran: Above our heads a nightingale (did something; poured out its soul, as like as not, or poured out its melody on the summer air, the cadence calling there for eleven syllables). As it was June it sang a trifle hoarsely. . . . The reader

will observe that the writer had then already read his "Trois Contes ", just as the first words of Conrad's first book were pencilled on the flyleaves and margins of "Madame Bovary." The last cadences, then, of Herodias run: "Et tous trois, ayant pris la tète de Jokanaan s'en allaient vers Galilé. Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient alternativement." . . . As cadence the later sentences are an exact pastiche of the former. In each the first contains nineteen syllables; the concluding one commences with "As it was", and is distinguished by the u sounds of "June" and "lourd" and the or sounds of "hoarse" and "portaient." It was in that way that, before the writer and Conrad met, they had studied their Flaubert. . . .

Conrad came round the corner of the house carrying a small child; that did not impede his slightly stiff gait and the semicircular motion of his head as he took in the odd residence, the lettuces protected by wire netting from the rabbits, or the immense view that lay before the cottage. He was conducted by Mr. Edward Garnett. In those days the writer had been overcome by one of those fits of agricultural enthusiasm that have overwhelmed him every few years, so that such descriptive writers as have attended to him have

given you his picture in a startling alternation as a Piccadilly dude in top hat, morning coat and spats, and as an extremely dirty agricultural labourer. Mr. Garnett lived an acre or so up the hill; Mr. Conrad and his family were staying on Limpsfield Chart. It was in those days Mr. Garnett's ambition to appear what the French call lézardé: he might have been a very, a very long lizard, indistinguishable, save for his spectacles, from the monstrous stones of his cavernous and troglodytic residence. From his mansion the writer's two-roomed cottage might have been a volcanic fragment, thrown off. Mr. Garnett frequently reproved the writer for wearing dark grey frieze. It caused, he said, a blot on the Limpsfield hillside into whose tones one should sink. The writer was engrossed in carrying out experiments, suggested by Professor Gressent of the Sorbonne in Paris. He was trying to make ten lettuces grow where before had been ten thousand nettles and was writing articles for the Outlook on the usage of the potato as an extirpator of thistles, in sand. That is accepted as good farming now.

Upon the writer Conrad made no impression at all. Mr. Conrad was the author of "Almayer's Folly", a great book of a romantic fashion, but