e gesture, the
words, the complex but consistent course of action which I had adopted
since that remarkable occasion when I had hailed him outside Euston
Station. How did I know (my sceptical friends would say) that I had not
hailed him outside Euston. I was firm about my assertion; he was quite
equally firm about his. He was obviously quite as honest a man as I,
and a member of a much more respectable profession. In that moment the
universe and the stars swung just a hair's breadth from their balance,
and the foundations of the earth were moved. But for the same reason
that I believe in Democracy, for the same reason that I believe in free
will, for the same reason that I believe in fixed character of virtue,
the reason that could only be expressed by saying that I do not choose
to be a lunatic, I continued to believe that this honest cabman was
wrong, and I repeated to him that I had really taken him at the corner
of Leicester-square. He began with the same evident and ponderous
sincerity, "You hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said----"

And at this moment there came over his features a kind of frightful
transfiguration of living astonishment, as if he had been lit up like
a lamp from the inside. "Why, I beg your pardon, sir," he said. "I beg
your pardon. I beg your pardon. You took me from Leicester-square. I
remember now. I beg your pardon." And with that this astonishing man let
out his whip with a sharp crack at his horse and went trundling away.
The whole of which interview, before the banner of St. George I swear,
is strictly true.

.....

I looked at the strange cabman as he lessened in the distance and the
mists. I do not know whether I was right in fancying that although his
face had seemed so honest there was something unearthly and demoniac
about him when seen from behind. Perhaps he had been sent to tempt me
from my adherence to those sanities and certainties which I had defended
earlier in the day. In any case it gave me pleasure to remember that
my sense of reality, though it had rocked for an instant, had remained
erect.

VI. An Accident

Some time ago I wrote in these columns an article called "The
Extraordinary Cabman." I am now in a position to contribute my
experience of a still more extraordinary cab. The extraordinary thing
about the cab was that it did not like me; it threw me out violently in
the middle of the Strand. If my friends who read the DAILY NEWS are
as romantic (a