Magick Without Tears

COINCIDENCE 267 flat?" "Her flat! are you crazy? This is a call-box in Shaftesbury Avenue." Collapse of A's confidence in the sanity of Nature. One may note that there was no similarity in the names of the exchanges, or in the numbers . It is the most grotesquely impossible case of "wrong number" that ever came my way. Now for one or two oddities. Recently, needing to relax, I borrowed three "thrillers" from different sources. In every case, the plot turned on two men being so alike that no one could tell them apart. (Rupert of Hentzau , John Chilcote, M.P.,Melander's Millions.) I travelled from Louisville to Detroit by a railroad whose nickname was the "Big Four," my object being some business connected with my Book 4. The name of my express was the "Big Four"-it left from No. 4 platform at 4 p.m. My sleeping berth was No. 4 in Car No.4 ; and my ticket was no. 44,444. It ought to have been April 4, I suppose ; but it wasn't. Last week a letter from me appeared in the Sunday Dispatch with regard to the Everest Mystery of 1921. I expressed my view that the two lost climbers, last seen on an easy snow-slope near the summit, had simply been blown into the air by one of the sudden gusts of incredibly fierce winds which are common at those heights, and dashed to earth perhaps a mile away. After reading this, I went to a friend's room to borrow a book, picked up her Shakespeare's Histories, and, opening it at random , came upon : They that stand high have many blasts to shake them, And if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces. (Richard III , Act I, Sc. 3) Now here's a story that's too good to lose; not the mistiest phantasm of an ideogram how to class it; for one thing, it's