Before looking at him I tested my memory for some such recollection as men sharing the same cabin have of their first meeting. But I had none. Farther back than that waking between five and six o’clock I couldn’t think. It was like trying to think back to the years preceding one’s birth; one’s personality dissolved into darkness. When I opened my eyes there was a man standing in the dim gray light with his back to me. Broad, muscular shoulders showed through the undershirt which was all he wore in addition to his trousers, of which the braces hung down the back. The dark hair was the hair of youth, and in a corner of the glass I caught the reflection of a chin which in spite of the lather I also knew to be young. Waiting till he had finished shaving and had splashed his face in the basin, I said, with a questioning intonation: "Hello?" Turning slowly, he lowered the towel from his dripping face, holding it out like a propitiatory offering. He responded then with the slow emphasis of surprise. "Hel-lo, old scout! So you’ve waked up at last! Thought you meant to sleep the trip out." "Have I been asleep long?" "Only since you came on aboard." It was on my tongue to ask, When was that? but a sudden prompting of discretion bade me seek another way. "You don’t mean to say I’ve slept more than—more than"—I drew a bow at a venture—"more than twenty-four hours?" He made the reckoning as he rubbed his shining face with the towel. "Let me see! This is Friday. We came on board late Tuesday night. When John-M’rie, our bedroom steward, brought me down to the cabin about half past nine you were already in your bunk doing the opium act. John-M’rie passed it up that you were a Frenchman, because you’d spoken French to him; but now I see you’re just an American like myself." So! I was an American but I could speak French. I could speak French sufficiently well for one Frenchman to mistake me for another. I stowed this data away, noting that if I had lost some of the power of memory the faculty of reasoning was unimpaired. Weighing my questions so as to get the maximum of information with the minimum of betrayal, I waited before hazarding anything else till he had finished polishing a face which had the handsome ugliness of a pug. "When do you think," was my next diplomatic venture, "that we shall get in?" "Oh, hang!" The exclamation was caused by finding himself pawing at the foot of my berth in his search for the towel-rack. "Wednesday morning with good luck," he went on, feeling along the wall till he touched a kind of rod, behind which he tucked the towel. "With bad weather we’ll not pick up the Nantucket Lightship before Thursday night. The old bucket’s supposed to do it in eight days; but you know what that means these times."