“The base of the boss is five, the central one of the nine digits, a number so hated by the Egyptians, even of the present day, as to be marked by them with a 0 on their watches--but the sacred number of the Shepherd Kings, who embodied it in the five-sided, five-angled, five-proportioned monument which they came so far to build, and which was the key to the proportions and dimensions of that Temple in which the five books of Moses were sacred to a people who left the land of their oppressors, five abreast, ‘with high hands,’ with outspread fingers, flaunting their number in the faces of the Egyptians, to whom it brought so much bad luck. “From the Pentalpha or five-pointed star may be reproduced the pyramid and the Temple proportions and those of the perfect human body--for this being inscribed in a circle, the centre of the star and circle being at the pubis, the arms and legs spread out easily just reach the points of the star--the centre of the breast being midway from the pubis to the crown of the head, and the base of the knee-cap midway from the pubis to the sole of the foot. The pyramid diagram gives the correct proportions of the human body with equal exactness and detail.” I felt attracted to this man who drew so freely from an apparently inexhaustible mental storehouse, and who so logically connected facts as to weave from mere numbers so wondrous a fabric; but I dared not intrude my callow personality upon one so well-rounded. As we went down the smooth stone steps, his foot slipped, and he would have fallen headlong had I not been fortunate enough to catch and support him. Even as it was, he wrenched his foot, so that he gladly accepted my proffered assistance to his car. It turned out that he, too, went down town, although further than I; and we entered the same surface car. He honored me by a request for an exchange of cards; and on the one which he handed me I read the name “Roger Brathwaite”; no address being given, although I learned from him that he resided in one of those old wards, once fashionable, where still a few old-fashioned people of means live in commodious old dwellings, and refuse to be crowded out by factory and warehouse, be they never so lofty and noisy by day, never so lonely and gloomy by night. Some three weeks later, I met Brathwaite in the street, and in walking with him, for a few blocks, learned that he had been a friend of my grandfather--whose name I bore in full. He told me that he had been inquiring concerning me, of my employers, and of others; and that he had had such good reports that he wished me to call upon him the next afternoon, at the address which he now gave, and where, he remarked, he wished to make a business proposition which might be to my advantage. It is needless to say that before the hour appointed, I bent my steps towards the place of meeting.