ction, because they
are untrue to life. At the present time the device of coincidence is
left to its true monopolists, the Society for Psychical Research and the
manufacturers of the penny dreadful. Unreasonable demands are, however,
made upon it by Dr Bataille; never in an awkward predicament does the
coincidence fail to help him; wheresoever he goes it times his arrival
rightly to witness some occasional and rare event, and it places him at
once in communication with the indispensable person whose presence was
antecedently unlikely. The very existence of his memoirs would have been
jeopardised had the Anadyr reached Point-de-Galle immediately before
instead of immediately after the catastrophe which converted Carbuccia.
At the beginning of his mission against Masonry, coincidence arranged
the last illness of the Cingalese pythoness to the exigencies of his
date of arrival; it brought John Campbell to Pondicherry and Phileas
Walder to Calcutta; at Singapore it fixed a Palladic institution in the
grade of Templar-Mistress to correspond with his flying visit on the
road to Shanghai. Now, all these coincidences are of the class which
come off in fiction and miss in the combinations of real life, but to
insist on this point would not disillusionise the believers in Dr
Bataille, who will say that he was assisted by Providence. We must show
that he has deceived them in matters which admit of verification, over
certain points of ordinary fact, which can be placed beyond the region
of dispute, and by which the truth of his narrative may be held to stand
or fall. I shall confine myself for this purpose to what he states at
first hand in his capacity as an eyewitness, and to two salient cases
which may be taken to represent the whole. Among the rest some are in
course of investigation, and so far as they have gone are promising
similar results; the locality of others has been so chosen as to baffle
inquiry; and in one or two instances I have failed to obtain results. It
is obviously impossible to prove that there is not a native hut in "a
thick and impassable forest" at an unindicated distance from
Point-de-Galle, or that this hut does not possess a vast subterranean
chamber. When we cannot check our witness we must regard what he tells
us in the light of those instances which it is possible to fix firmly.
Among negative results I may mention an inquiry into the alleged death
of a person named George Shekleton in a Masonic lodge a