Out of wild rumor and cross-rumor, certain salient facts were eventually precipitated like sediment from a clouded solution.  It seemed that the engaging Messrs. X, Y and Z had been induced, practically under false pretenses to book passage, they having read in the public prints that the prodigal and card-foolish son of a cheese-paring millionaire father meant to take the ship too; but he had grievously disappointed them by not coming aboard at all.  Then, when in an effort to make their traveling expenses back, they uncorked their newest trick and device for inspiring confidence in gudgeons, the particular gudgeon of their choosing had refused to pay up.  Naturally they were fretful and peevish in the extreme.  It spoiled the whole trip for them.

Except for this one small affair it was, on the whole, a pleasant voyage.  We had only one storm and one ship’s concert, and at the finish most of us were strong enough to have stood another storm.  And the trip had been worth a lot to us—­at least it had been worth a lot to me, for I had crossed the ocean on one of the biggest hotels afloat.  I had amassed quite a lot of nautical terms that would come in very handy for stunning the folks at home when I got back.  I had had my first thrill at the sight of foreign shores.  And just by casual contact with members of the British aristocracy, I had acquired such a heavy load of true British hauteur that in parting on the landing dock I merely bowed distantly toward those of my fellow Americans to whom I had not been introduced; and they, having contracted the same disease, bowed back in the same haughty and distant manner.

When some of us met again, however, in Vienna, the insulation had been entirely rubbed off and we rushed madly into one another’s arms and exchanged names and addresses; and, babbling feverishly the while, we told one another what our favorite flower was, and our birthstone and our grandmother’s maiden name, and what we thought of a race of people who regarded a cup of ostensible coffee and a dab of honey as constituting a man’s-size breakfast.  And, being pretty tolerably homesick by that time, we leaned in toward a common center and gave three loud, vehement cheers for the land of the country sausage and the home of the buckwheat cake—­and, as giants refreshed, went on our ways rejoicing.

That, though, was to come later.  At present we are concerned with the trip over and what we had severally learned from it.  I personally had learned, among other things, that the Atlantic Ocean, considered as such, is a considerably overrated body.  Having been across it, even on so big and fine and well-ordered a ship as this ship was, the ocean, it seemed to me, was not at all what it had been cracked up to be.

During the first day out it is a novelty and after that a monotony—­except when it is rough; and then it is a doggoned nuisance.  Poets without end have written of the sea, but I take it they stayed at home to do their writing.  They were not on the bounding billow when they praised it; if they had been they might have decorated the billow, but they would never have praised it.