sociability to an excess. He shows restraint.

Also, we had with us the elderly gentleman of impaired disposition,
who had crossed thirty times before and was now completing his
thirty-first trip, and getting madder and madder about it every
minute. I saw him only with his clothes on; but I should say,
speaking offhand, that he had at least fourteen rattles and a
button. His poison sacs hung 'way down. Others may have taken
them for dewlaps, but I knew better; they were poison sacs.

It was quite apparent that he abhorred the very idea of having to
cross to Europe on the same ocean with the rest of us, let alone
on the same ship. And for persons who were taking their first
trip abroad his contempt was absolutely unutterable; he choked at
the bare mention of such a criminal's name and offense. You would
hear him communing with himself and a Scotch and soda.

"Bah!" he would say bitterly, addressing the soda-bottle. "These
idiots who've never been anywhere talking about this being rough
weather! Rough weather, mind you! Bah! People shouldn't be allowed
to go to sea until they know something about it. Bah!"

By the fourth day out his gums were as blue as indigo, and he was
so swelled up with his own venom he looked dropsical. I judged
his bite would have caused death in from twelve to fourteen minutes,
preceded by coma and convulsive rigors. We called him old Colonel
Gila Monster or Judge Stinging Lizard, for short.

There was the spry and conversational gentleman who looked like
an Englishman, but was of the type commonly denominated in our own