The lad who helped in the second
cabin told me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was,
but thought, "by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite, that
he was some one from the saloon."

I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air
and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good family
who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But, making
every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could have heard
him tell his own stories. They were so swingingly set forth, in such
dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits
of acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction. There were
tales of the P. and O. Company, where he had been an officer; of the
East Indies, where in former years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal
Engineers, where he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides
of life, each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait. He had the
talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen. The best
talkers usually address themselves to some particular society; there
they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know Russian and
yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a frank, headlong power
of style, and a broad, human choice of subject, that would have turned
any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric
talker, plain, strong, and cheerful; and the things and the people of
which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the minds of those
who heard him. This, with a certain added colouring of rhetoric and
rodomontade, must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the
ears of duchesses and hostlers.

Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure in
his narration. The Engineers, for instance, was a service which he
praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the sergeants;
but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in particular, one
among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like an episode in the
rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had imagined. But then
there came incidents more doubtful, which showed an almost impudent
greed after gratuities, and a truly impudent disregard for truth. And
then there was the tale of his departure. He had wearied, it seems, of
Woolwich, and one fine day, with a companion, slipped up to London for a
spree. I have a suspicion that spree w