Whether the man had been squatting down, or whether it was the slope of
the ground that suddenly revealed him, I know not, but there he was not
ten paces away. I could see that he wore an oilskin and sou'wester and
judged him at once as a fisherman.
"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.
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