Flash-lights from the Seven Seas

by William L. Stidger

But one morning a month later as we were all boarding a train in Fusan, Korea, bound for Seoul, who should be sitting in the car but "Old Mr. 'All gentlemen must be silent.'"

This time he was in American clothes. We had a Japanese friend with us. We told this friend about the incident on the train in northern Japan and asked him who the man was.

"Why that is a member of the House of Lords and he is going up to Korea representing the Diet to make a report on the Korean outrages," we were told.

Another month passed and I was coming back from Seoul, Korea, to Tokio, Japan, when I suddenly ran into our old friend "All gentlemen must be silent!" This time he was drunk again, and sitting in a Japanese dining car with the same Kimono on that he had worn the first time we saw him. He saw me enter the car.

I tried to avoid him, but he was not to let this opportunity for international courtesy go by unnoticed and unimproved. So, much to my delight and surprise, he arose, and made a low bow.

I bowed back. He made another bow until his nose almost touched the car. I made a return bow. He made a third one. I followed suit. He made a fourth. I made a fourth, although I was beginning to feel dizzy and my insides were beginning to complain.

I wondered when the thing would stop. I thought of a hundred fat men I had seen on a Gymnasium floor trying to do the same thing and touch the floor with their hands. I knew that there was a limit to my endurance in a test of this kind. He bowed five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times, and I bowed back. I could see things whirling around me.

"Blame it, why doesn't he stop some time!" I said to myself.

I was desperate. Then suddenly I looked at him and he looked at me and he said, with great dignity, "All gentlemen must be silent!" and sat down, with his friends and his wines.

I don't know whether he realized how funny it was or not. I don't know whether he even knew what he was saying in his drunken condition, but I do know that when I got out of that car into the vestibule I had the laugh of my life. A Japanese woman came by, smiled at me and I am sure said to herself: