There followed the period of sailor-ashorishness in Marseilles with the Bonapartist aristocracy. After the episode of the unvarnished coach loaded with actresses Conrad telegraphed to his uncle to come and pay his debt and embarked on his Carlist adventure. This is told sufficiently, as Conrad used to tell it by word of mouth, in the episode of the Tremolino in "The Mirror of the Sea." When taking this episode down from Conrad's dictation-as indeed when taking others of his personal recollections down from dictation at times when Conrad was too crippled by gout and too depressed to write the writer noticed that Conrad sensibly modified aspects and facts of his word-ofmouth narrations. The outlines remained much the same, the details would differ.

As told by Conrad-and the writer must have heard all Conrad's stories five times and his favourite ones much more often- the Carlist adventure was as follows: At the date of his leaving the French service the Carlist War was being desultorily waged in the North of Spain. (The Carlists were the supporters of Don Carlos, the legitimist Pretender to the Spanish throne.) The cause of the Carlists sufficiently appealed to Conrad; it was Legitimist; it was picturesque and carried on with at least some little efficiency. It offered a chance of adventure. In company with

like-minded friends, then, Conrad set to work at providing rifles for the army of the Pretender. They purchased a small, fast sailing ship-the Tremolino, beautiful name. And of all the craft on which Conrad sailed this was the most beloved by him. In our early days her name was seldom off his tongue and, when he mentioned her, his face lit up. Nay, it lit up before he mentioned her, the smile coming, before the name, to his lips.

The writer never heard, in those days, what make of ship she was. He was expected to know that. Conrad would say, "You know how the Tremolino used to come round. .

So the

writer imagined her as a felucca, with high, bowed, white sails against storm clouds and rustcoloured cliffs. She was the beautiful ship-as Turgenev was the beautiful Russian genius.

Pacing up and down Conrad would relate how they ran those rifles. The method was this: They would load the Tremolino, at Marseilles, with oranges, bound ostensibly for Bordeaux or any up-channel port. Thus, "If any Spanish gun-boat accosted us we would have a perfectly good bill of lading. Out in the Channel we would meet a British schooner and throwing the oranges overboard we would load up with rifles. . . Those

particular sentences, with their slightly unusual use of the word "would", Conrad never varied. He would have begun his story, unemotionally, with such historic explanations as his hearer seemed to need. Then he would come to the Tremolino and his face would light up. This emotion would last him for a minute or two. At, as it were, the angle where Spain turns down from France in the Mediterranean, as if the Tremolino had got thus far and was just going through the blue water with her burden of oranges, he would render his voice dry to say either, "The method Or, "Our modus operandi was as And then, after taking a breath,

was this.

follows. .

"Out in the Channel we.

He would then go on to explain the necessities they had when making that landfall. "You could bribe any Spanish guarda costa on land with a few pesetas or a bottle or two of rum. . . ." But the officers of the gunboats that patrolled the coast were incorruptible. . . .

"So one night the landlord of the inn omitted to show the agreed-on light. He was drunk. In the morning we saw a Spanish gunboat steaming back and forth in the narrow offing. The bay was a funnel, like this. . We ran the Tremolino on a Swam ashore and got country

rock, set fire to her.

clothes for a disguise and proceeded to Marseilles as best we could. Penniless. Without a penny."

In telling these stories Conrad would thus occasionally duplicate his words, trying the effect of them. Then we would debate: What is the practical, literary difference between "Penniless" and "Without a penny"? You wish to give the effect, with the severest economy of words, that the disappearance of the Tremolino had ruined them, permanently, for many years. . . . Do you say then, penniless, or without a penny? . . . You say Sans le sou: that is fairly permanent. Un sans le sou is a fellow with no money in the bank, not merely temporarily penniless. But "without a penny almost always carries with it, "in our pockets." If we say then "without a penny", that connoting the other, "We arrived in Marseilles without a penny in our pockets." . . . Well, that would be rather a joke: as if at the end of a continental tour you had got back to town with only enough just to pay your cab-fare home. Then you would go to the bank. So it had better be "penniless." That indicates more a state than a temporary condition.

.. Or would it be better to spend a word or two more on the exposition? That would make the paragraph rather long and so dull the edge of the story..

It was with these endless discussions as to the exact incidence of words in the common spoken language -not the literary language-that Conrad's stories always came over to the writer. Sometimes the story stopped and the discussion went on all day; sometimes the discussion was shelved for a day or two. There were words that we discussed for years. One problem was, as has already been hinted at: How would you translate bleu-foncé as applied to a field of cattle cabbage: the large Jersey sort, of whose stalks varnished walking sticks are made? Or bleu-du-roi? And again, what are the plurals of those adjectives in French - as a side issue. . . . That problem we discussed at intervals for ten years - the problem of the field of cabbages, not of course the plurals. . . . Now we shall never solve it. ...

Conrad, then, again telegraphed to his uncle to come and pay his debts. . . . The writer used to have a great-uncle whose one expedient in life was to take a cab. One day this gentleman, walking past Exeter Hall, met a lion. Exeter Hall in the sixties was a menagerie. When he was asked, "What did you do?" he would reply in tones of mild disgust at the questioner's want of savoir faire, "Do? Why I took a cab!". . . In the same way Conrad used to telegraph to his uncle