slice of meat upon a fork at dinner time and stick the fork holding
it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea time. The
dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick
at last and kept a sharp lookout for missing forks--they knew where
to find one if it was not in its place. Now the odd thing was that,
after waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should
hear it mentioned a _second time_ within the same twenty-four
hours by a college youth of the present generation. Strange, but
true. And so it has happened to me and to every person, often and
often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts or
thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow
of subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest
our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
until in some future life we see the photographic record of our
thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more
pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body than you think
for. Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you
there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many
"swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks,
taking an active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel,
each one of them, of your corporal being--do you suppose are whirled
along like pebbles in a stream with the blood which warms your frame
and colors your cheeks? A noted German physiologist spread out a
minute drop of blood under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and
counted the globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by