[Illustration: AGE 5 (_From an Oil Painting_)]
[Illustration: AGE 17.(From a Photograph.)
(_As a Midshipman._)]
[Illustration: PRESENT DAY. (_From a Photo by Elliott & Fry._)]
Mr. Clark Russell was born in New York of English parents. His literary
taste is a natural gift, his mother being a niece of Charles Lloyd, the
poet, and a cousin of Christopher Wordsworth, the late Bishop of
Lincoln, and herself known as a poetess, and the authoress, among other
things, of "The Wife's Dream." Mr. Clark Russell went to sea as a middy
before he was fourteen, and during the next eight years picked up the
thorough knowledge of seafaring life which he afterwards turned to such
good use in his novels. His first book was "John Holdsworth," but it was
his second story, "The Wreck of the Grosvenor," which he wrote in little
more than two months and sold to a publisher for fifty pounds, which
marked a new era in the evolution of the nautical novel. Since that time
Mr. Clark Russell has had the sea to himself, and his descriptions of
sea-scenery, and his pictures of real-life sailors, are not likely soon
to find a rival. Mr. Clark Russell's latest story, "List, Ye
Landsmen"--one of his very best--is now appearing in _Tit-Bits_.