"Good evening!" I cried genially in my best German. "It's a fine night!" "Good evening!" said he, also in German and quite involuntarily it seemed, for the next instant he spoke again in a very different key, and _in English_. "My God! Are you insane?" he said in a low intense voice and with a distinct trace of guttural accent. "Don't speak German here! Have you no other language? Don't you speak English?" I don't know whether you could have literally knocked me down with a feather, but a stout feather would certainly have come pretty near doing it. I simply gaped at him. Again he spoke; this time in German, but almost in a whisper. "Do not speak German here so loudly! Do you not know any English?" A dim perception of the almost incredible truth began to dawn on me and I did my best to grapple with the situation. I had to account for my astonished stare; that was the first thought that flashed through my head. "Of course I speak English," I said, and by the favour of Heaven I found myself instinctively saying those words in the very accents of the German waiter in "Bill's All Right" (my first offence on the professional stage), "but I thought you were Hans Eckstein. I could hardly believe my own eyes!" "Hans Eckstein? Who is he?" demanded my new acquaintance, and I was pleased to observe no suspicion in his voice, merely a little astonishment. "A friend," I answered glibly, "one of us." He looked at me for a moment, very narrowly, and in those seconds of silence I began to realise more exactly what must have happened. The upper current of air had been blowing _westwards_--not eastwards as the wind blew on the surface. The good land under my feet was assuredly not Germany; almost certainly it must be part of my own blessed native island, or why this insistence on my speaking English, rather than, say, Dutch or Danish? And then the man I was speaking to, what must he obviously be? There was only one answer possible. I may add that I had the presence of mind not to stare blankly at him while I thought these thoughts. I let him do the staring while I fished my pipe out of my oilskin pocket and began to fill it. "So!" he murmured, and I thought he seemed satisfied enough, especially as he asked with manifest curiosity but without any apparent suspicion in his voice, "And how did you get here?" Yet when I looked up from my pipe-filling to answer him I could almost swear that he had done something to make his features less visible--pulled his sou'wester further down and sunk his chin into the high collar of his oilskin, it certainly seemed to me. As I had gathered a very insufficient impression of him before, this was a little provoking. Still, I told myself that our acquaintance was only beginning. How to ripen it--that was the problem. I tried the effect of merely winking and saying with a cool, knowing air: "The usual way. Do you have to ask?"