“Been long in London, sir?”
“You perceive that I am a stranger, then?” I asked.
“Well,” said the man, as he cracked his whip and drove his lumbering coach straight at an orifice between two cabs just wide enough, it seemed to me, for a wheelbarrow, “I'm a observer, I am. When I sees that speckled tie droopin' from a collar of unknown horigin, and them rum kind of boots, I says to myself a Rooshian, for 'alf a sovereign. Come from Rooshia, sir?”
The man's naïveté delighted me.
“I belong to an allied power,” I replied, wondering if his powers of observation would enable him to decide my nationality now.
He seemed to debate the question as, with an apropos greeting to each cabman, his 'bus bumped them to the side and sailed down the middle of the street.
“Native o' Manchuria, perhaps?” he hazarded.
“Not quite; try again.”
“Siberia?” he suggested next.
Seeing that either his imagination or my appearance confined his speculations to Asia, I told him forthwith that I was French.