ded by omens are simple coincidences.

One remarkable coincidence of this kind came to my ears the other day.
A man I know was suddenly dismissed from his post with three months'
salary in his pocket. I happened to be talking about superstitions
with him the same afternoon, when he said: "It's all very well, but
only last week, when I was in the country, some one was telling
fortunes by tea-leaves in the house where I was stopping; and he
turned to me and said: 'Old man, there's a big surprise in store for
you, and I see some money in the bottom of the cup.' I shan't let them
know this has happened," he added, "as it might encourage them to be
superstitious." Certainly, when such a coincidence happens in our own
lives, it is difficult to believe that it is not a deliberate act on
the part of Nature. Nature, we can see, does concern herself with the
minutest cell or atom of our being; why not with these premonitory
shadows of our deeds and sufferings? Many coincidences, on the other
hand, admit of a less fatalistic explanation. Everybody has noticed
how one no sooner meets a new name in a book that one comes on the
same name in real life also for the first time. I had not read Mr
Forrest Reid's novel, _The Bracknels_, a week, when, on walking down a
London avenue, the same name--"The Bracknels"--stared at me from a
gate. It is not easy, however, to conceive that destiny deliberately
leads one into a suburban avenue to enjoy the humour of one's surprise
at so trivial a coincidence. It is a more natural conclusion that
these names one begins to notice so livelily would still have remained
unobserved, were it not that they had acquired a new significance for
one's eyes owing to something one had read or heard. After all, one
can ride down the Strand on the top of a 'bus for a month without
consciously seeing a single name over a shop-window. But let any of
these names become real to us as the result of some accident, and it
leaps to one's eyes like a scene in a play. It is merely that one now
selects this particular name for observation, and ignores the others.
It is all due to the artistic craving for patterns. I am inclined at
times to explain the evidence in favour of the Baconian theory of
Shakespeare as pattern-mongering. Those cyphers, those coincidences of
phrase and suggestion at such-and-such a line from the beginning or
end of so many of the plays, those recurrences of hoggish pictures,
are enough to shake the bal