You have your paper horn clutched in your big, craggy fist, and for your entrance you have planned a noisy, colorful and exuberant greeting to your friends and tenants. You find your house a focus of public and police attention. Can you imagine yourself forgetting under the circumstances that you are approaching this startling and unexpected situation so unsuitably hatted and armed with a paper horn?

Maybe one could be startled into forgetfulness. You shoulder your way through the cluster of the curious and you barge up to the cop on the door. You identify yourself and ask him what's going on. Instead of answering you, he sticks his head in the door and shouts up the stairs.

``Got the upstairs guy,'' he bellows. ``The owner. Do I send him up?'' Then he turns back to you. ``Go on in,'' he says. ``They'll tell you what's cooking.''

Even then, as you go into the house oppressed by the knowledge that something is cooking and that your house has passed under this unaccountable, official control, could you go on forgetting that you still had that ridiculous hat on your head and you were still carrying that childish horn in your hand?

What I'm getting at is that we were fully prepared for Felix's being an odd one. We'd seen his handiwork out in the back yard, and the little his tenants had told us of him did make him sound a little special. We were not, however, prepared for anything like the apparition that confronted us as Felix came up the stairs. He, of course, must have been equally unprepared for what confronted him, but, nonetheless, I did find his reaction startling.