Stories of the Sea have in my humble¹ opinion been quite unfairly dealt with by the majority of their narrators. Told for the benefit of non-seafaring folk by writers, who, however great their literary gifts, have had merely a nodding acquaintance with the everyday doings on board ship, they generally lack proportion, and fail to convey to shore folk an intimate sense of the sea-atmosphere. Especially has this been so with books for young people, as was no doubt to be expected. So much has this been the case that sailors generally despise sea-stories, finding them utterly² unlike anything they have ever experienced themselves. Of late years there have been some notable exceptions among sea story writers, most of them happily still living and doing splendid service. One cunning hand is still, that of James Runciman, whose yarns³ are salt as the ocean, and have most truly held the mirror up to Nature in a manner unexcelled by any other marine⁴ writer living or dead. Freedom from exaggeration, clarity of expression, and sympathetic insight into sea-life were his main features, and no one hated more than he the utterly impossible beings and doings common to the bulk of sea-fiction.