why, we look up
suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery
of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony
and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our
familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which
one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper,
written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of
Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and
fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of
rain--and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon
and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs
drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the
rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are
slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow
them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs.
We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to
reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two,
a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with
a steam radiator.

Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on which he
did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the unexpected
and the egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to
be what might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his willingness
to tempt fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had spent the night
in a station-house; again and again he had found himself the dupe of
ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his watch and money had been the
price of one flattering allurement. But with undiminished ardour he
picked up every glove cast before him into the merry lists of adventure.

One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the
older central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the
sidewalks--the home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that
abandons home for the specious welcome of the thousand-candle-power
_table d'hote_.

The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and
watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore his
tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin; and
once he had written to the editor of a magazine that "Junie's Love Test"
by Miss Libbey, had been the book t