The woman with the green hat had left her table. Izzy's shrewd eyes picked her out again--this time standing against a far wall talking to the professor, and the professor was rubbing his forehead and saying "No, no," with his hands. And now the entertainer was singing again: "Got de St. Louis Blues, jes' as blue as Ah can be, Dat man has a heart like a rock ca-ast in de sea, Or else he would not have gone so far away from me." VAGABONDIA Here they come. Five merry travelers in a snorting, dust-caked automobile. Wanderers, egad! Bowling rakishly across the country. Dusters and goggles and sunburn. Prairie nights have sung to them. Little towns have grinned at them. Mountains, valleys, forests and stars have danced across their windshield. The newspaper man stood watching them haul up to the Adams Street curb. His heart was tired of tall buildings and the endless grimace of windows. Here was a chariot out of another world. Motor vagabonds. Scooting into a city with a swagger to their dust-caked wheels. And scooting out again. The newspaper man thought, "The world isn't buried yet. There's still a restlessness left. Things change from triremes to motor boats, from Rosinante to automobiles. But adventure merely mounts a new seat and goes on. Dick Hovey sang it once: "I am fevered with the sunset, I am fretful with the bay, For the wander thirst is on me And my soul is in Cathay." The five merry travelers crawled out and stretched themselves. They doffed their goggles and slipped off their linen dusters and changed forthwith from a group of flying gnomes into five tired-looking citizens of California. Two middle aged women. Two middle-aged men and a son. One of the men said, "Well, we'll lay up here for awhile, I got a blister on my hand from the wheel." One of the women answered, "I must buy some hairpins, Martin." The newspaper man said to himself, "What ho! I'll give them a ring. Why not? A story of the modern wanderlust. Anyway, they're not averse to publicity seeing they've got two 'coast to coast' pennants on the back of their machine. What they've seen. Why they've journeyed. A tirade against the monotony of business. And I'll stick in one of Hovey's stanzas, the one that goes: "There's a schooner in the offing With her topsails shot with fire. And my heart has gone aboard her For the Islands of Desire." "You can say," said the spokesman of the wanderers, "that this is Martin S. Stevers and party. I am Mr. Stevers of the Stevers Linseed Oil Company in San Francisco. Here's my card." "Thanks," said the newspaper man, taking the card. "And now," spake on the spokesman of the wanderers, "what can I do for you?"