So then we descended another mile or two to an inferno, full of naked, sooty devils forever feeding sulphurous pitfires in the nethermost parlors of the damned; but they said this was the stokehole; and I was in no condition to argue with them, for I had suddenly begun to realize that I was far from being a well person.  As one peering through a glass darkly, I saw one of the attendant demons sluice his blistered bare breast with cold water, so that the sweat and grime ran from him in streams like ink; and peering in at a furnace door I saw a great angry sore of coals all scabbed and crusted over.  Then another demon, wielding a nine-foot bar daintily as a surgeon wields a scalpel, reached in and stabbed it in the center, so that the fire burst through and gushed up red and rich, like blood from a wound newly lanced.

I had seen enough and to spare; but my guide brought me back by way of the steerage, in order that I might know how the other half lives.  There was nothing here, either of smell or sight, to upset the human stomach—­third class is better fed and better quartered now on those big ships than first class was in those good old early days—­but I had held in as long as I could and now I relapsed.  I relapsed in a vigorous manner—­a whole-souled, boisterous manner.  People halfway up the deck heard me relapsing, and I will warrant some of them were fooled too—­they thought I was seasick.

It was due to my attack of climate fever that I missed the most exciting thing which happened on the voyage.  I refer to the incident of the professional gamblers and the youth from Jersey City.  From the very first there was one passenger who had been picked out by all the knowing passengers as a professional gambler; for he was the very spit-and-image of a professional gambler as we have learned to know him in story books.  Did he not dress in plain black, without any jewelry?  He certainly did.  Did he not have those long, slender, flexible fingers?  Such was, indeed, the correct description of those fingers.  Was not his eye a keen steely-blue eye that seemed to have the power of looking right through you?  Steely-blue was the right word, all right.  Well, then, what more could you ask?

Behind his back sinister yet fascinating rumors circulated.  He was the brilliant but unscrupulous scion of a haughty house in England.  He had taken a first degree at Oxford, over there, and the third one at police headquarters, over here.  Women simply could not resist him.  Let him make up his mind to win a woman and she was a gone gosling.  His picture was to be found in rogues’ galleries and ladies’ lockets.  And sh-h-h!  Listen!  Everybody knew he was the identical crook who, disguised in woman’s clothes, escaped in the last lifeboat that left the sinking Titanic.  Who said so?  Why—­er—­everybody said so!

It came as a grievous disappointment to all when we found out the truth, which was that he was the booking agent for a lyceum bureau, going abroad to sign up some foreign talent for next season’s Chautauquas; and the only gambling he had ever done was on the chance of whether the Tyrolian Yodelers would draw better than our esteemed secretary of state—­or vice versa.