en stolen."

"I'm sorry," he repeated with a bored smile, and turned to look at
himself in the glass.

Then I became angry with him and his attendants and his whole blessed
theatre.

"My hat," I said bitingly, "has been stolen from me--while I slept."

* * * * *

You must have seen me wearing it in the dear old days. Greeny brown it
was in colour; but it wasn't the colour that drew your eyes to it--no,
nor yet the shape, nor the angle at which it sat. It was just the
essential rightness of it. If you have ever seen a hat which you felt
instinctively was a clever hat, an alive hat, a profound hat, then that
was my hat--and that was myself underneath it.

XI. THE LUCKY MONTH

"Know thyself," said the old Greek motto. (In Greek--but this is an
English book.) So I bought a little red volume called, tersely enough,
_Were you born in January?_ I was; and, reassured on this point, the
author told me all about myself.

For the most part he told me nothing new. "You are," he said in effect,
"good-tempered, courageous, ambitious, loyal, quick to resent wrong, an
excellent _raconteur_, and a leader of men." True. "Generous to a
fault"--(Yes, I was overdoing that rather)--"you have a ready sympathy
with the distressed. People born in this month will always keep their
promises." And so on. There was no doubt that the author had the idea
all right. Even when he went on to warn me of my weaknesses he
maintained the correct note. "People born in January," he said, "must be
on their guard against working too strenuously. Their extraordinarily
active brains----" Well, you see what he means. It _is_ a fault
perhaps, and I shall be more careful in future. Mind, I do not take
offence with him for calling my attention to it. In fact, my only
objection to the book is its surface application to _all_ the people who
were born in January. There should have been more distinction made
between me and the rabble.

I have said that he told me little that was new. In one matter, however,
he did open my eyes. He introduced me to an aspect of myself entirely
unsuspected.

"They," he said--meaning me, "have unusual business capacity, and are
destined to be leaders in great commercial enterprises."

One gets at times these flashes of self-revelation. In an instant I
realised how wasted my life had been; in an instant I resolved that here
and now I would put my great gifts to their proper uses. I would b