“That is a preparation of fish,” he explained. “You won’t find it at all bad.”
“Thank you, sir,” replied the old man, helping himself with an air of relief which would have been extremely comic had it been shorn of its pathos. “I am afraid,” he went on confidentially, “of gettin’ slugs to eat. I’m told that they eat them in these parts.”
“This,” replied the other, with stupendous gravity, “is not the slug season. Besides, if you did get ’em, I dare say you would be pleasantly surprised.”
“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.
“Well,” he answered gravely, “if you come to analyse it, I dare say there is as much sense in it as in other languages--when you know it, you know.”