“Hear, hear!” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing, nothing. You were saying—”
“The vehicles proceeding in the opposite direction had also been temporarily arrested, but after a moment they were permitted to proceed. I had fallen into a meditation, when suddenly the most extraordinary thing took place. My hat was snatched abruptly from my head! And as I looked back I perceived it being waved in a kind of feverish triumph from the interior of a taxicab, which, even as I looked, disappeared through a gap in the traffic and was lost to sight.”
I didn’t laugh, but I distinctly heard a couple of my floating ribs part from their moorings under the strain.
“Must have been meant for a practical joke,” I said. “What?”
This suggestion didn’t seem to please the old boy.
“I trust,” he said, “I am not deficient in an appreciation of the humorous, but I confess that I am at a loss to detect