All the types that travel on a big English-owned ship were on ours.  I take it that there is a requirement in the maritime regulations to the effect that the set must be complete before a ship may put to sea.  To begin with, there was a member of a British legation from somewhere going home on leave, for a holiday, or a funeral.  At least I heard it was a holiday, but I should have said he was going home for the other occasion.  He wore an Honorable attached to the front of his name and carried several extra initials behind in the rumble; and he was filled up with that true British reserve which a certain sort of Britisher always develops while traveling in foreign lands.  He was upward of seven feet tall, as the crow flies, and very thin and rigid.

Viewing him, you got the impression that his framework all ran straight up and down, like the wires in a bird cage, with barely enough perches extending across from side to side to keep him from caving in and crushing the canaries to death.  On second thought I judge I had better make this comparison in the singular number —­there would not have been room in him for more than one canary.

Every morning for an hour, and again every afternoon for an hour, he marched solemnly round and round the promenade deck, always alone and always with his mournful gaze fixed on the far horizon.  As I said before, however, he stood very high in the air, and it may have been he feared, if he ever did look down at his feet, he should turn dizzy and be seized with an uncontrollable desire to leap off and end all; so I am not blaming him for that.

He would walk his hour out to the sixtieth second of the sixtieth minute and then he would sit in his steamer chair, as silent as a glacier and as inaccessible as one.  If it were afternoon he would have his tea at five o’clock and then, with his soul still full of cracked ice, he would go below and dress for dinner; but he never spoke to anyone.  His steamer chair was right-hand chair to mine and often we practically touched elbows; but he did not see me once.

I had a terrible thought.  Suppose now, I said to myself—­just suppose that this ship were to sink and only we two were saved; and suppose we were cast away on a desert island and spent years and years there, never knowing each other’s name and never mingling together socially until the rescue ship came along—­and not even then unless there was some mutual acquaintance aboard her to introduce us properly!  It was indeed a frightful thought!  It made me shudder.

Among our company was a younger son going home after a tour of the Colonies—­Canada and Australia, and all that sort of bally rot.  I believe there is always at least one younger son on every well-conducted English boat; the family keeps him on a remittance and seems to feel easier in its mind when he is traveling.  The British statesman who said the sun never sets on British possessions spoke the truth, but the reporters in committing his memorable utterance to paper spelt the keyword wrong—­undoubtedly he meant the other kind—­the younger kind.