be referred to with awe as a genuine 1920; but all
that the passage of time can really do for your dresser
is to give a more beautiful surface and tone to the
wood. This, surely, is a matter which you can
judge for yourself without being an expert. If
your dresser looks old you have got from it all that
age can give you; if it looks beautiful you have got
from it all that a craftsman of any period can give
you; why worry, then, as to whether or not it is a
“genuine antique”? The expert may
tell you that it is a fake, but the fact that he has
suddenly said so has not made your dining-room less
beautiful. Or if it is less beautiful, it is only
because an “expert” is now in it.
Hurry him out.
Having read lately an appreciation of that almost
forgotten author Marryat, and having seen in the shilling
box of a second-hand bookseller a few days afterward
a copy of Masterman Ready, I went in and bought
the same. I had read it as a child, and remembered
vaguely that it combined desert-island adventure with
a high moral tone; jam and powder in the usual proportions.
Reading it again, I found that the powder was even
more thickly spread than I had expected; hardly a
page but carried with it a valuable lesson for the
young; yet this particular jam (guava and cocoanut)
has such an irresistible attraction for me that I
swallowed it all without a struggle, and was left
with a renewed craving for more and yet more desert-island
stories. Having, unfortunately, no others at hand,
the only satisfaction I can give myself is to write
about them.
I would say first that, even if an author is writing
for children (as was Marryat), and even if morality
can best be implanted in the young mind with a watering
of fiction, yet a desert-island story is the last
story which should be used for this purpose. For
a desert-island is a child’s escape from real
life and its many lessons. Ask yourself why you
longed for a desert-island when you were young, and
you will find the answer to be that you did what you
liked there, ate what you liked, and carried through
your own adventures. It is the “Family”
which spoils The Swiss Family Robinson, just
as it is the Seagrave family which nearly wrecks Masterman
Ready. What is the good of imagining yourself
(as every boy does) “Alone in the Pacific”
if you are not going to be alone? Well, perhaps
we do not wish to be quite alone; but certainly to
have more than two on an island is to overcrowd it,
and our companion must be of a like age and disposition.
