The lad who helped in the second cabin told
me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was, but
thought, 'by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite,
that he was some one from the saloon.'
I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his
air and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some
good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from
home. But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I
wish you could have heard hin, tell his own stories. They were so
swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated
here and there by such luminous bits of acting, that they could
only lose in any reproduction. There were tales of the P. and O.
Company, where he had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in
former years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers, where
he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides of life,
each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait. He had the
talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen. The
best talkers usually address themselves to some particular society;
there they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know
Russian and yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a
frank, headlong power of style, and a broad, human choice of
subject, that would have turned any circle in the world into a
circle of hearers.
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