“One of our piano tuners lives in this house,” he said.  “I knocked at your door by mistake.”

The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her smile.

At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him.  And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back, ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations.  Every door that he found in the house was painted green.

Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk.  The fantastic African was still there.  Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.

“Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?” he asked.

In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid advertisement of his master’s profession.

“Dar it is, boss,” he said, pointing down the street.  “But I ’spect you is a little late for de fust act.”

Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre the blazing electric sign of its new play, “The Green Door.”

“I’m informed dat it’s a fust-rate show, sah,” said the negro.  “De agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute a few of his cards along with de doctah’s.  May I offer you one of de doctah’s cards, sah?”

At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass of beer and a cigar.  When he had come out with his lighted weed he buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp post on the corner: 

“All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way for me to find her.”

Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.

FROM THE CABBY’S SEAT

The cabby has his point of view.  It is more single-minded, perhaps, than that of a follower of any other calling.  From the high, swaying seat of his hansom he looks upon his fellow-men as nomadic particles, of no account except when possessed of migratory desires.  He is Jehu, and you are goods in transit.  Be you President or vagabond, to cabby you are only a Fare, he takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles your vertebrae and sets you down.

When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with legal rates you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you have left your pocketbook behind you are made to realise the mildness of Dante’s imagination.

It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby’s singleness of purpose and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom’s peculiar construction.  The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather.  Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap—­you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land—­and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.