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hirds, of the persons who were threatened by the still invisible danger. A steamer that goes to the bottom has generally fewer passengers on board than would have been the case had she not been destined to go down. Two trains that collide, an express that falls over a precipice, &c., carry less travellers than they would on a day when nothing is going to happen. Should a bridge collapse, the accident will generally be found to occur, in defiance of all probability, at the moment the crowd has just left it. In the case of fires in theatres and other public places, things unfortunately happen otherwise. But there, as we know, the principal danger does not lie in the fire, but in the panic of the terror-stricken crowd. Again, a fire-damp explosion will usually occur at a time when the number of miners inside the mine is appreciably inferior to the number that would habitually be there. Similarly, when a powder factory is blown up, the majority of the workmen, who would otherwise all have perished, will be found to have left the mill for some trifling, but providential, reason. So true is this, that the almost unvarying remark, that we read every day in the papers, has become familiar and hackneyed, as: "A catastrophe which might have assumed terrible proportions was fortunately confined, thanks to such and such a circumstance," &c., &c.; or, "One shudders to think what might have happened had the accident occurred a moment sooner, when all the workmen, all the passengers," &c. Is this the clemency of Chance? We are becoming ever less inclined to credit it with a personality, with design or intelligence. There is more reason in the supposition that something in man has defined the disaster; that an obscure but unfailing instinct has preserved a great number of people from a danger that was on the point of taking shape, of assuming the imminent and imperious form of the inevitable; and that their unconsciousness, taking alarm, is seized with hidden panic, which manifests itself outwardly in a caprice, a whim, some puerile and inconsistent incident, that is yet irresistible and becomes the means of salvation. End of Project Gutenberg's The Buried Temple, by Maurice Maeterlinck *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BURIED TEMPLE *** ***** This file should be named 19711.txt or 19711.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenber
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