"Maybe, maybe! Though I don't hold by foreign ways."

Such was the beginning of a passing friendship between two men who
had nothing in common except their country; for one was a peer of
the realm, travelling in Spain for the transaction of his own
private affairs, or possibly for the edification of his own private
mind, and the other was Captain John Thomas Bontnor, late of the
British mercantile service.

Being a simple-minded person, as many seamen are, Captain Bontnor
sought to make himself agreeable.

"This is the first time," he said, "that I have set foot in Spain,
though I've heard the language spoken, having sailed in the Spanish
Main, and down to Manilla one voyage likewise. It is a strange-
sounding language, I take it--a lot of jabbering and not much
sense."

He spoke somewhat slowly, after the manner of one who had always had
a silent tongue until grey hairs came to mellow it.

The young man, his hearer, looked slightly distressed, as if he was
suppressing some emotion. He was rather a vacuous-looking young
man--startlingly clean as to countenance and linen. He was shaven,
and had he not been distinctly a gentleman, he might have been a
groom. He apparently had a habit of thrusting forward his chin for
the purpose of scratching it pensively with his forefinger. This
elegant trick probably indicated bewilderment, or, at all events, a
slight mystification--he had recourse to it now--on the question of
the Spanish language.