e truth of this just as the fictionist recognises and is
governed by the opposite of it, each according to his lights. In
recording the actual, the authentic, the definite, your chronicler may
set down in all soberness things which are utterly inconceivable; may
set them down because they have happened. But he who deals with the
fanciful must be infinitely more conventional in his treatment of the
probabilities and the possibilities, else the critics will say he has
let his imagination run away with him. They'll tell him to put ice on
his brow and advise sending his creative faculty to the restcure.

Jules Verne was a teller of most mad tales which he conjured up out of
his head. The Brothers Wright and Edison and Holland, the submarine man,
worked out their notions with monkey wrenches and screw drivers and
things, thereby accomplishing verities far surpassing the limit where
common sense threw up a barrier across the pathway of Verne's genius. H.
G. Wells never dreamed a dream of a world war to equal the one which
William Hohenzollern loosed by ordering a flunky in uniform to transmit
certain dispatches back yonder in the last week of July and the first
week of August, 1914.

So always it has gone. So always, beyond peradventure, it must continue
to go.

If in his first act the playwright has his principal characters
assembled in a hotel lobby in Chicago and in Act II has them all bumping
into one another--quite by chance--in a dugout in Flanders, the
reviewers sternly will chide him for violating Rule 1 of the book of
dramatic plausibilities, and quite right they will be too. But when the
identical event comes to pass in real life--as before now it has--we
merely say that, after all, it's a small world now, isn't it? And so
saying, pass along to the next preposterous occurrence that has just
occurred. In fiction coincidence has its metes and bounds beyond which
it dare not step. In human affairs it has none.

Speaking of coincidences, that brings me round to the matter of a
certain sergeant and a certain private in our American Expeditionary
Force which is a case that is a case in point of what I have just been
saying upon this subject. If Old Man Coincidence had not butted into
the picture when he did and where he did and so frequently as he did,
there would be--for me--no tale to tell touching on these two, the
sergeant and the private. But he did. And I shall.

To begin at the remote beginning, there once upo