“I mean to say, taxis squawk, you know. Rather like cats in a sort of way.”

“I had not observed the resemblance,” he said, rather coldly.

“Have some lemon-squash,” I said. The conversation seemed to be getting rather difficult.

“Thank you. Half a glassful, if I may.” The hell-brew appeared to buck him up, for he resumed in a slightly more pally manner. “I have a particular dislike for cats. But I was saying—— Oh, yes. Sometimes I am positively appalled at what I see around me. It is not only the cases which come under my professional notice, painful as many of those are. It is what I see as I go about London. Sometimes it seems to me that the whole world is mentally unbalanced. This very morning, for example, a most singular and distressing occurrence took place as I was driving from my house to the club. The day being clement, I had instructed my chauffeur to open my landaulette, and I was leaning back, deriving no little pleasure from the sunshine, when our progress was arrested in the middle of the thoroughfare by one of those blocks in the traffic which are inevitable in so congested a system as that of London.”

I suppose I had been letting my mind wander a bit, for when he stopped and took a sip of lemon-squash I had a feeling that I was listening to a lecture and was expected to say something.

“Hear, hear!” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing, nothing. You were saying——”

“The vehicles proceeding in the opposite direction had also been temporarily arrested, but after a moment they were permitted to proceed. I had fallen into a meditation, when suddenly the most extraordinary thing took place. My hat was snatched abruptly from my head! And as I looked back I perceived it being waved in a kind of feverish triumph from the interior of a taxicab, which, even as I looked, disappeared through a gap in the traffic and was lost to sight.”

I didn’t laugh, but I distinctly heard a couple of my floating ribs part from their moorings under the strain.

“Must have been meant for a practical joke,” I said. “What?”

This suggestion didn’t seem to please the old boy.

“I trust,” he said, “I am not deficient in an appreciation of the humorous, but I confess that I am at a loss to detect anything akin 

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