So, on Christmas eve, instead of Hallam Hall and a Yule log, I was in a gale plunging and pitching off the coast of Ireland, and the only log on board was the one the captain kept to himself.
I sat in the smoking-room, depressed and cross, and it must have been on the principle that misery loves company that I foregathered with Talbot, or rather that Talbot foregathered with me.

Certainty, under happier conditions and in haunts of men more crowded, the open-faced manner in which he forced himself upon me would have put me on my guard.

But, either out of deference to the holiday spirit, as manifested in the fictitious gayety of our few fellow-passengers, or because the young man in a knowing, impertinent way was most amusing, I listened to him from dinner time until midnight, when the chief officer, hung with snow and icicles, was blown in from the deck and wished all a merry Christmas.
Even after they unmasked Talbot I had neither the heart nor the inclination to turn him down.

Indeed, had not some of the passengers testified that I belonged to a different profession, the smoking-room crowd would have quarantined me as his accomplice.

On the first night I met him I was not certain whether he was English or giving an imitation.
All the outward and visible signs were English, but he told me that, though he had been educated at Oxford and since then had spent most of his years in India, playing polo, he was an American.