needing no introduction. We annexed the boat formally, broke open the
passengers' bath-room door--on the Manilla lines the Dons do not
wash--cleaned out the orange peel and cigar-ends at the bottom of the
bath, hired a Lascar to shave us throughout the voyage, and then
asked each other's names.

Three ordinary men would have quarrelled through sheer boredom before
they reached Southampton. We, by virtue of our craft, were anything
but ordinary men. A large percentage of the tales of the world, the
thirty-nine that cannot be told to ladies and the one that can, are
common property coming of a common stock. We told them all, as a
matter of form, with all their local and specific variants which are
surprising. Then came, in the intervals of steady card-play, more
personal histories of adventure and things seen and suffered: panics
among white folk, when the blind terror ran from man to man on the
Brooklyn Bridge, and the people crushed each other to death they knew
not why; fires, and faces that opened and shut their mouths horribly
at red-hot window frames; wrecks in frost and snow, reported from the
sleet-sheathed rescue-tug at the risk of frost-bite; long rides after
diamond thieves; skirmishes on the veldt and in municipal committees
with the Boers; glimpses of lazy tangled Cape politics and the
mule-rule in the Transvaal; card-tales, horse-tales, woman-tales, by
the score and the half hundred; till the first mate, who had seen
more than us all put together, but lacked words to clothe his tales
with, sat open-mouthed far into the dawn.

When the tales were done we picked up cards till a curious hand or a
chance remark made one or other of us say, 'That reminds me of a man
who--or a business which--' and the anecdotes would continue while
the _Rathmines_ kicked her way northward through the warm water.