astonishing number of people without nerves; for such bangs thunder
through the whole house right up to the garret, as a gust fills the
passage, and doors fly open and shut, shut and open; everybody feels the
discomfort, but no one will take the trouble to go down and fasten the
origin of the evil; the porter is out in the town, and as long as he is
away the inmates must put up with an absence of all domestic comfort.

It was just such an unfastened, unweariedly banging door that led to
what I have to relate.

As I passed it, I heard a voice, which seemed familiar to me, an old
beloved voice--though at first I could not recall where I had heard
it--calling impatiently to the porter. It was on the subject of the
banging door. The man was evidently the only nervous individual in that
house; at any rate, the porter was not, for he appeared to be quite
wanting in feeling both for his door and for the man who had interested
himself in it, and was now fumbling in vain with a latch-key, which did
not appear to fit.

At last the porter came out of his subterranean hole, and it was during
a little altercation between the now placable and gentle voice, sorry
for its previous irritability, and the growling porter, that with all
the power of an awakened recollection I recognised my old friend of
student-days, David Holst, with whom I had lived three of the richest
years of my youth.

"If that is you, David, you must let me in before you lock the door!" I
cried, just as I should have done in the good old days, twenty years
before.