after luncheon we would shoot, after dinner we would eat plum pudding
floating in blazing brandy, dance with the servants, and listen to the
waits singing "God rest you, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay."

To a lone American bachelor stranded in London it sounded fine. And in
my gratitude I had already shipped to my hostess, for her children,
of whose age, number, and sex I was ignorant, half of Gamage's dolls,
skees, and cricket bats, and those crackers that, when you pull them,
sometimes explode. But it was not to be. Most inconsiderately my
wealthiest patient gained sufficient courage to consent to an operation,
and in all New York would permit no one to lay violent hands upon him
save myself. By cable I advised postponement. Having lived in lawful
harmony with his appendix for fifty years, I thought, for one week
longer he might safely maintain the status quo. But his cable in reply
was an ultimatum. 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. He seemed to have
spent much time, and according to himself much money, at the French
water