Dr. S., a well-known and highly respected Boston physician, a particular
friend of the late Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Southern
Confederacy. It was with reference to a work which Mr. Stephens was
about to publish that Dr. S. called upon me. After talking that matter
over we got conversing on other subjects, among the rest a family
relationship existing between us,--not a very near one, but one which I
think I had seen mentioned in genealogical accounts. Mary S. (the last
name being the same as that of my visitant), it appeared, was the
great-great-grandmother of Mrs. H. and myself. After cordially
recognizing our forgotten relationship, now for the first time called to
mind, we parted, my guest leaving me for his own home. We had been
sitting in my library on the lower floor. On going up-stairs where Mrs.
H. was sitting alone, just as I entered the room she pushed a paper
across the table towards me, saying that perhaps it might interest me.
It was one of a number of old family papers which she had brought from
the house of her mother, recently deceased.

I opened the paper, which was an old-looking document, and found that it
was a copy, perhaps made in this century, of the will of that same Mary
S. about whom we had been talking down-stairs.

If there is such a thing as a purely accidental coincidence this must be
considered an instance of it.

All one can say about it is that it seems very unlikely that such a
coincidence should occur, but it did.

I have not tried to keep my own personality out of these stories. But
after all, how little difference it makes whether or not a writer appears
with a mask on which everybody can take off,--whether he bolts his door