ad passed on.

One white-coifed, tall, black-clad figure sprang lightly down from the
waggon-box, and hurried across to where the body was lying. A mellow,
womanly cry of pity came from under the starched coif. She turned and
beckoned. Then she knelt down by the girl's side, opened the torn
garments, and felt with compassionate, kindly touches about the still
heart.

The other two black figures came hurrying over then, stumbling amongst the
stones and karroo-bushes in their haste. Lifting her, they turned the
white, bloodless young face to the blue sky. It was cut and scratched, but
not otherwise disfigured. Her bound arms, dragged upwards before it, had
shielded it from the thorns and the sharp stones. They were raw from the
elbows to the wrists.

They listened at the torn childish bosom with anxious ears. They got a few
drops of brandy between the clenched little teeth. The sealed lips
quivered; the heart fluttered feebly, like a dying bird. They gave her
more stimulant, and waited, while the Hottentot driver dozed, and the
sleek, well-fed oxen chewed the cud patiently, standing in the sun.

Then the Sisters lifted her, with infinite care, and carried her to the
waggon. The twenty-four-foot whip-lash cracked, and the patient beasts
moved on. Very soon the big white tilt was a mere retreating speck upon
the veld. The ants were still busy when the wild dogs came out and
sniffed regretfully at those traces on the ground.

Coincidence, did you say, lifting your eyebrows over the book, as the blue
waggon of the Sisters rolled lumberingly into the story? The long arm of
coincidence stretched to aching tenuity by the dramatist and the novelist!
Nay! but the thing happened, just as I have told.

What is the thing we are agreed to call coincidence?

Once I was passing over one of the bridges that span the unclean London
ditch called the Regent's Canal. I had walked all the way from Piccadilly
Circus to Gloucester Crescent, haunted by the memory of a man I had once
known. He was the broken-down, drunken, studio-drudge of a great artist, a
splendid Bohemian, who had died some years before. Why did the thought of
the palette-scraper, the errand-goer, the drunken creature with the
cultivated voice and the ingratiating, gentlemanly manners, possess me as
I went? I recalled his high, intellectual, pimply forehead, and large
benevolent nose, in a chronic state of inflammation, and seedy
semi-clerical garb, for the thing had be