oment to let a jam of vehicles pass. As he did
so a stranger crossed the street, noticed him, and came dodging his way
through the blockade and thrust some clippings into his hand.

"Mr. Clemens," he said, "you don't know me, but here is something you
may wish to have. I have been saving them for more than twenty years,
and this morning it occurred to me to send them to you. I was going to
mail them from my office, but now I will give them to you," and with a
word or two he disappeared. The clippings were from the Christian Union
of 1885, and were the much-desired article. Clemens regarded it as a
remarkable case of mental telegraphy.

"Or, if it wasn't that," he said, "it was a most remarkable
coincidence."

The other circumstance has been thought amusing. I had gone to Redding
for a few days, and while there, one afternoon about five o'clock, fell
over a coal-scuttle and scarified myself a good deal between the ankle
and the knee. I mention the hour because it seems important. Next
morning I received a note, prompted by Mr. Clemens, in which he said:

Tell Paine I am sorry he fell and skinned his shin at five o'clock
yesterday afternoon.

I was naturally astonished, and immediately wrote:

I did fall and skin my shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon, but how
did you find it out?

I followed the letter in person next day, and learned that at the same
hour on the same afternoon Clemens himself had fallen up the front steps
and, as he said, peeled off from his "starboard shin a ribbon of skin
three inches long." The disaster was still uppermost in his mind at the
time of writing, and the suggestion of my own mishap had flashed out for
no particular reason.

Clemens was always having his fortune told, in one way or another,
being superstitious, as he readily confessed, though at times professing
little faith in these prognostics. Once when a clairvoyant, of whom he
had never even heard, and whom he had reason to believe was ignorant of
his family history, told him more about it than he knew himself,
besides reading a list of names from a piece of paper which Clemens
had concealed in his vest pocket he came home deeply impressed. The
clairvoyant added that he would probably live to a great age and die in
a foreign land--a prophecy which did not comfort him.

CCLXI. MINOR EVENTS AND DIVERSIONS

Mark Twain was deeply interested during the autumn of 1907 in the
Children's Theater of the Jewish Educational