The latter I put away out of your case,
though the marvels of coincidence are stranger than fiction. Every one
of us has a little record within his heart of such experiences. I have
been startled by a coincidence into a five minutes' belief in
supernatural agency. One opens a book of six hundred pages, and catches,
on the instant, the passage for which he looked the whole day before. An
actor dies in ranting 'there is another and a better world.' A soldier
is saved from the punishment of death for sleeping on his post, by the
fact of having been able to say that St. Paul's on a certain night
struck thirteen, which it never did before. Andrew Gordon, the miser,
drew a prize of twenty thousand pounds for the number 2001, which he
dreamed of the night previous he bought the ticket. A shepherd was the
discoverer of the Australian diggings, by having taken up a piece of
what he considered quartz to throw at his dog called Goldy. Human
history is full of such things; but, marvellous as they are, they are
not more so than the ways by which man manufactures mysteries, and gets
them believed as the work of Heaven. As to that illuminated figure I saw
in the wood"----
My speech was interrupted by a strange sound from the other end of the
house. Graeme started to his feet. It was not one of pain coming from a
sick-room, but rather one of surprise, and there seemed a bustle among
the servants.
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