There were three of us, all newspaper men, the only passengers on a little tramp steamer that ran where her owners told her to go.  She had once been in the Bilbao iron ore business, had been lent to the Spanish Government for service at Manilla; and was ending her days in the Cape Town coolie-trade, with occasional trips to Madagascar and even as far as England.  We found her going to Southampton in ballast, and shipped in her because the fares were nominal.  There was Keller, of an American paper, on his way back to the States from palace executions in Madagascar; there was a burly half-Dutchman, called Zuyland, who owned and edited a paper up country near Johannesburg; and there was myself, who had solemnly put away all journalism, vowing to forget that I had ever known the difference between an imprint and a stereo advertisement.

Ten minutes after Keller spoke to me, as the Rathmines cleared Cape Town, I had forgotten the aloofness I desired to feign, and was in heated discussion on the immorality of expanding telegrams beyond a certain fixed point.  Then Zuyland came out of his cabin, and we were all at home instantly, because we were men of the same profession 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.