My hesitation is prolonged.  Shall I speak, shall I not speak?  Already night has begun to fall.  At last I was about to open my mouth when my companion prevented me.

“You are a Frenchman?” he said in my native tongue.

“Yes, sir,” I replied in his.

Evidently we could understand each other.

The ice was broken, and then question followed on question rather rapidly between us.  You know the Oriental proverb: 

“A fool asks more questions in an hour than a wise man in a year.”

But as neither my companion nor myself had any pretensions to wisdom we asked away merrily.

“Wait a bit,” said my American.

I italicize this phrase because it will recur frequently, like the pull of the rope which gives the impetus to the swing.

“Wait a bit!  I’ll lay ten to one that you are a reporter!”

“And you would win!  Yes.  I am a reporter sent by the Twentieth Century to do this journey.”

“Going all the way to Pekin?”

“To Pekin.”

“So am I,” replied the Yankee.

And that was what I was afraid of.

“Same trade?” said I indifferently.

“No.  You need not excite yourself.  We don’t sell the same stuff, sir.”

“Claudius Bombarnac, of Bordeaux, is delighted to be on the same road as—­”

“Fulk Ephrinell, of the firm of Strong, Bulbul & Co., of New York City, New York, U.S.A.”

And he really added U.S.A.

We were mutually introduced.  I a traveler in news, and he a traveler in—­In what?  That I had to find out.

The conversation continues.  Ephrinell, as may be supposed, has been everywhere—­and even farther, as he observes.  He knows both Americas and almost all Europe.  But this is the first time he has set foot in Asia.  He talks and talks, and always jerks in Wait a bit, with inexhaustible loquacity.  Has the Hunson the same properties as the Garonne?

I listen to him for two hours.  I have hardly heard the names of the stations yelled out at each stop, Saganlong, Poily, and the others.  And I really should have liked to examine the landscape in the soft light of the moon, and made a few notes on the road.

Fortunately my fellow traveler had already crossed these eastern parts of Georgia.  He pointed out the spots of interest, the villages, the watercourses, the mountains on the horizon.  But I hardly saw them.  Confound these railways!  You start, you arrive, and you have seen nothing on the road!

“No!” I exclaim, “there is none of the charm about it as there is in traveling by post, in troika, tarantass, with the surprises of the road, the originality of the inns, the confusion when you change horses, the glass of vodka of the yemtchiks—­and occasionally the meeting with those honest brigands whose race is nearly extinct.”

“Mr. Bombarnac,” said Ephrinell to me, “are you serious in regretting all those fine things?”