towards me, but I kept my gaze
fixed on the indigo masses of the obscure prospect before us.

"Who are you looking for?" he asked.

"Not so much who as what," I said. "And even then it isn't so easy to
define. I've heard men call it beauty and mystery, and things like that;
but just now it seemed to me that what I wanted most was a universal
miracle--some really inexplicable happening that would upset every law the
physicists have ever stated. I was thinking, for instance, how thrilling
it would be if the sun did not rise this morning. One would know, then,
that all our scientific guesses at laws were just so many baby
speculations founded on nothing more substantial than a few thousand years
of experience which had, by some chance given always more or less the same
results. Like a long run on the red, you know."

"I know," he said. "Well? Go on."

I was greatly stimulated by his encouragement. Here, at last, was the
listener I had been waiting for all through the night.

"One gets so infernally sick of everything happening according to fixed
rules," I continued. "And the more you learn the nearer you are to the
deadly ability of being able to foretell the future. If we ever do reach
that point in our intellectual evolution, I only hope that I shan't be
there to see it. Imagine the awful ennui of a world where the expected
always happened, and next year's happenings were always expected! And yet
we go on seeking after knowledge, when we ought surely to avoid it, as the
universal kill joy."

"Hm!" commented my new friend on what I felt to be a note of doubtful
agreement.

"You don't agree with that?" I asked.

"Well, I see what you're after, in a way," he acknowledged; "but it
doesn't seem to me that it amounts to very much--practically."

I was a trifle disappointed. I had not expected any insistence on the
practical from a man who could whistle Schubert and Shakespeare to the
dawn.

"Oh, practically! Perhaps not," I replied with a hint of contempt for
anything so common.

He gave a little self-conscious laugh. "You can't get away from the
practical in this life," he said. "Even in--" He seemed to bite off the
beginning of confidence with an effort. "You may dream half the night," he
began again, with a thin assumption of making an impersonal statement,
"but before the night's over you'll come up against the practical, or the
practicable, or the proper right thing, or something, that makes you see
what a