Magick Without Tears

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