With an appreciative and glowing eye, Miss Brewster read from her mimeographed bill of fare such legends as “ropa con carne,” “bacalao seco,” “enchiladas,” and meantime devoured chechenaca, which, had it been translated into its just and simple English of “hash,” she would not have given to her cat.

Nor did her visual and prandial preoccupations inhibit her from a lively interest in the surrounding Babel of speech in mingled Spanish, Dutch, German, English, Italian, and French, all at the highest pitch, for a few rods away the cathedral bells were saluting Heaven with all the clangor and din of the other place, and only the strident of voice gained any heed in that contest.  Even after the bells paused, the habit of effort kept the voices up.  Miss Brewster, dining with her father a few hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience from any intent of eavesdropping in overhearing the talk of the table to the right of her.  The remark that first fixed her attention was in English, of the super-British patois.

“Can’t tell wot the blighter might look like behind those bloomin’ brown glasses.”

“But he’s not bothersome to any one,” suggested a second speaker, in a slightly foreign accent.  “He regards his own affairs.”

“Right you are, bo!” approved a tall, deeply browned man of thirty, all sinewy angles, who, from the shoulders up, suggested nothing so much as a club with a gnarled knob on the end of it, a tough, reliable, hardwood club, capable of dealing a stiff blow in an honest cause.  “If he deals in conversation, he must Sell it.  I don’t notice him giving any of it away.”

“He gave some to Kast the last time he dined here,” observed a languid and rather elegant elderly man, who occupied the fourth side of the table.  “Mine host didn’t like it.”

“I should suppose Senior Kast would be hardened,” remarked the young Caracunan who had defended the absent.

“Our eyeglassed friend scored for once, though.  They had just served him the usual table-d’hote salad—­you know, two leaves of lettuce with a caterpillar on one.  Kast happened to be passing.  Our friend beckoned him over.  ’A little less of the fauna and more of the flora, Senior Kast,’ said he in that gritty, scientific voice of his.  I really thought Kast was going to forget his Swiss blood, and chase a whole peso of custom right out of the place.”

“If you ask me, I think the blighter is barmy,” asserted the Briton.

“Well, I’ll ask you,” proffered the elegant one kindly.  “Why do you consider him ‘barmy,’ as you put it?”

“When I first saw him here and heard him speak to the waiter, I knew him for an American Johnny at once, and I went, directly I’d finished my soup, and sat down at his table.  The friendly touch, y’ know.  ‘I say,’ I said to him, ’I don’t know you, but I heard you speak, and I knew at once you were one of these Americans—­ tell you at once by the beastly queer accent, you know.  You are an American, ay—­wot?’ Wot d’ you suppose the blighter said?  He said, ‘No, I’m an ichthyo’—­somethin’ or other—­”