of the style and language, so I could not help saying, "The author
will much appreciate your compliment, madame, for he is sitting
opposite you. This is M. de Vogue himself." I need hardly say that the
under-bred woman overwhelmed us with civilities after that.

The Volga steamers were then built after the type of Mississippi
boats, with immense superstructures; they were the first oil-burning
steamers I had ever seen, so I got the Captain's permission to go down
to the engine-room. Instead of a grimy stokehole full of perspiring
firemen and piles of coal, I found a clean, white-painted place with
one solitary but clean man regulating polished taps. The Chief
Engineer, a burly, red-headed, red-bearded man, came up and began
explaining things to me. I could then talk Russian quite fluently, but
the technicalities of marine engineering were rather beyond me, and I
had not the faintest idea of the Russian equivalents for, say,
intermediate cylinder, or slide-valve. I stumbled lamely along somehow
until a small red-haired boy came in and cried in the strongest of
Glasgow accents, "Your tea is waiting on ye, feyther."

It appeared that the Glasgow man had been Head Engineer of the river
steamboat company for ten years, but we had neither of us detected the
other's nationality.

On another occasion, whilst proceeding to India in a Messageries
Maritimes boat, I made the acquaintance of an M. Bayol, a native of
Marseilles, who had been for twenty-five years in business at
Pondicherry, the French colony some 150 miles south of Madras.
M. Bayol was a typical "Marius," or Marseillais: short, bald, bearded
and rotund of stomach. It is unnecessary to add that he talked twenty
to the dozen, with an immense amount of gesticulation, and that he