"It's gone!" he gasped. "He's taken your box!"
I emerged from the hall closet both a little startled and a little humiliated.
"Yes, and he's taken my hat and coat," I sadly confessed.
CHAPTER VII
THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS
It is one of life's little ironies, I suppose, that man's surest escape from misery should be through the contemplation of people more miserable than himself. Such, however, happens to be the case. And prompted by this genial cross between a stoic and a cynic philosophy, I had formed the habit of periodically submerging myself in a bath of cleansing depravity.
The hopelessness of my fellow-beings, I found, seemed to give me something to live for. Collision with lives so putrescently abominable that my own by contrast seemed enviable, had a tendency to make me forget my troubles. And this developed me into a sort of calamity chaser. It still carried me, on those nights when sleep seemed beyond my reach, to many devious and astounding corners of the city, to unsavory cellars where lemon-steerers and slough-beaters foregathered, to ill-lit rooms where anarchists nightly ate the fire of their own ineffectual oratory, to heavy-fumed drinking-places where pocket-slashers and till-tappers and dummy-chuckers and dips forgot their more arduous hours.
But more and more often I found my steps unconsciously directed toward that particular den of subterranean iniquities known as The Café of Failures. For it was in this new-world Cabaret du Neant that I had first heard of that engaging butler known to his confederates as "Sir Henry." And I still had hopes of recovering my stolen great-coat.
Night by night I went back to that dimly lit den of life's discards, the same as a bewildered beagle goes back to its last trace of aniseed. I grew inured to its bad air, unobservant of its scorbutic waiters, undisturbed by its ominous-looking warren of private rooms, and apathetic before its meretricious blondes.