“South of Canada,” he said to himself, “this sort of thing is vulgar and unnecessary. _I_ don’t need it, any more than a cow needs a side–pocket. It’s too beastly hot for comfort at this moment. I’d carry it over my arm, only that I should feel how absurdly heavy it really is.” Then he looked ahead through the thick snow, and, although he was a man of strong nerves, he started and stepped back like a woman who sees a cow. “Great Cæsar’s Ghost!” said he. He was justified in calling thus upon the most respectable spook of antiquity. The sight he saw was strange enough in itself: seen in the squalid, commonplace sub–suburban street, it was bewildering. There, ahead of him, walked Mephistopheles—Mephistopheles dressed in a red flannel suit, trimmed with yellow, all peaks and points; and on the head of Mephistopheles was an old, much worn, brown Derby hat. Brant caught Mephisto by the shoulder and turned him around. He was a slight, undersized man of fifty, whose moustache and goatee, dyed an impossible black, served only to accentuate the meagre commonness of his small features. [Illustration] “Who are you?” demanded Brant. “Sh–h–h!” said the shivering figure, “lemme go! I’m Zozo!” Brant stared at him in amazement. What was it? A walking advertisement—for an automatic toy or a new tooth–powder? “It’s all right,” said the slim man, his teeth chattering, “lemme get along. I’m most freezing. I’m Zozo—the astrologer. Why—don’t you know?—on Rapelyea Street?” Brant dimly remembered that there was a Rapelyea Street, through which he sometimes passed on his way to the railroad station, and he had some faint memory of a gaudily painted shanty decked out with the signs of the zodiac in gilt _papier maché_. “My orfice got a–fire this evening,” explained Zozo, “from the bakery next door. And I had to light out over the back fence. Them people in that neighborhood is kinder superstitious. They ain’t no idea of astrology. They don’t know it’s a Science. They think it’s some kind of magic. And if they’s to see me drove out by a common, ordinary fire, they’d think I was no sort of an astrologer. So I lit out quiet.” His teeth chattered so that he made ten syllables out of “quiet.” “They don’t understand the Science of it,” he continued, “and the fire got at my street clo’es before I knew it, and so I had to light out mighty quick. Now, jes’ lemme get home, will you? This here flannel ain’t no fur coat.” Brant’s coat came off his shoulders in an instant. “Put this on,” he said. “Confound you!—” as the man resisted,—“_put it on!_” The astrologer slipped into the coat with a gasp of relief. “Cracky!” he cried, “but I was freezin’!” “Do you live far from here?” Brant inquired. “Just a bit up the road. I’m ’most home, now,” replied Zozo, still chattering as to his teeth.