enuities are
recorded in Mr Sharper Knowlson's _Origins of Popular Superstitions_,
have unearthed similar significances in the dates of Napoleon III.
They add the figure 1852--the date of his inauguration as Emperor--to
the ciphers of 1808, his birth-date--1852 + 1 + 8 + 0 + 8--and arrive
at the fatal date, 1869, when the Empire came to an end. The Empress
Eugenie was born in 1826 and married in 1853. Add the ciphers in these
dates to 1852--1852 + 1 + 8 + 5 + 3 or + 1 + 8 + 2 + 6--and 1869
appears once more. But there is no need to go on with these quaint
sums. I have quoted enough to suggest the intricate and subtle
patterns which the ingenious can discover everywhere in Nature.

Nature, assuredly, has provided us with coincidences so lavishly that
we may well go about in amazement. Even the fiction of Mr William Le
Queux is not quite so abundant in strange coincidences as the life of
the most ordinary man you could see reading a halfpenny newspaper. It
is only in literature, indeed, that coincidences seem unnatural.
Sophocles has been blamed for making a tragedy out of a man who
unwittingly slew his father and afterwards unwittingly married his
mother. It is incredible as fiction; but I imagine real life could
give us as startling a coincidence even as that. Each of us is, to use
Sir Thomas Browne's phrase, Africa and its prodigies. We tread a
miraculous earth which is all mirrors and echoes, hints and symbols
and correspondences. Each deed we do may, for all we know, be echoed
and mirrored in Nature in a thousand places, even before we do it, and
I can imagine it possible that the shape of a man's fate may be
scattered over the palm of his hand. I am a sceptic on the subject,
and I see what a door is opened to charlatanry if we admit the
presence of too many meanings in the world about us. But I am not
ready to deride the notion that there may be some undiscovered law
underlying many of the coincidences which puzzle us. True, if someone
contended that a mysterious sort of gravitation was working steadily
through the years to bring those four soldiers together again at the
Birmingham dinner, I should be anxious to hear his proofs. But I am
willing to listen patiently to almost any theory on the subject. No
theory could be more sensational than the facts.

XIV

ON INDIGNATION

There is nothing in which the newspapers deal more generously than
indignation. There is enough indignation going to waste in the c