COINCIDENCE 
269 
and no other person, in this room, and no other room, at this 
time, and no other time. How did that come about?" The 
answer to that question is the first entry in your Magical 
Diary: and, with a slightly different object in view, the first 
step in the practice of Liber Thisharb and the acquisition of 
Magical Memory. 
Why, hang it all; the events of the last hour, even, might 
have gone just an infinitesimally little bit different, and the 
interview would not have taken place as it did. Consider then, 
that factors stretching back into Eternity-all 
the factors 
there are!-have 
each one contributed 
in its degree to 
bringing this interview about. What a fantastic improbability! 
Yet here we are. 
Chance blindly rules the Universe. But what is Chance? 
And where does purpose intervene? To what extent? 
I shall now conduct you, no less firmly than Mr. E. Phillips 
Oppenheim, to Monte Carlo. 
You walk quietly into the Casino; it seems to you that the 
excitement is even more noticeable than usual. You see a 
friend at the table: "Here in the nick of time!" he gasps. 
"Black has just turned up for the 24th time running." You 
press forward to plank the maximum on Red. The wheel 
spins; Black again! "Forty thousand she-devils in the belfry 
of St. Nicholas Rocambole-de-Ronchonot!" 
"But-but" (you stammer when spirits of hartshorn have 
revived you) "in the whole history of the tables a colour has 
never turned up more than 24 times running!" 
My poor friend, what has that got to do with it? True, 
from the start it is countless millions to I that there will not 
be a run of 24 on the red or the black; but the probability on 
any single spin (ignoring zero) is always one to one. The 
black compartments do not contract because the ball has 
fallen into anyone of them. 
Anyone who gambles at all is either a dilettante, a crook, 
or a B.F. If you could get the B.F.'s to understand the very 
elementary mathematics set forth above, good-night to