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with two passengers in his sidecar, collided with a post, and all were seriously injured. In a field, by the side of the road, was found the body of a Rodwell shepherd, named Funnell, who had no known relation with the accident.”
    An occurrence of the 14th of June, 1931, is told of in the Home News (Bronx) of the 15th. “When Policeman Talbot of the E. 126th St. station went into Mt. Morris Park at 10 a.m., yesterday, to awaken a man apparently asleep on a bench near the 124th St. gate, he found the man dead. Dr. Patterson, of Harlem Hospital, said that death had probably been caused by heart failure.” New York Sun, June 15—that soon after the finding of this body on the bench, another dead man was found on a bench nearby.
    I have two stories, which resemble the foregoing stories, but I should like to have them considered together.
    In November, 1888 (St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Dec. 20, 1888), two residents of Birmingham, Alabama, were murdered and their bodies were found in the woods. “Then there was such a new mystery that these murder-mysteries were being overlooked.” In the woods, near Birmingham, was found a third body. But this was the body of a stranger. “The body lies unidentified at the undertaker’s rooms. No one who had seen it can remember having seen the man in life, and identification seems impossible. The dead man was evidently in good circumstances, if not wealthy, and what he could have been doing at the spot where his body was found is a mystery. Several persons who have seen the body are of the opinion that the man was a foreigner. Anyway he was an entire stranger in this vicinity, and his coming must have been as mysterious as his death.”
    I noted these circumstances, simply as a mystery. But when a situation repeats, I notice with my livelier interest. This situation is of local murders, and the appearance of the corpse of a stranger, who had not been a tramp.
    Philadelphia Public Ledger, Feb. 4, 1892—murder near Johnstown, Pa.—a man and his wife, named Kring, had been butchered, and their bodies had been burned. Then, in the woods, near Johnstown, the corpse of a stranger was found. The body was well-dressed, but could not be identified. Another body was found—“well-dressed man, who bore no means of identification.”
    There is a view by which it can be shown, or more or less demonstrated, that there never has been a coincidence. That is, in anything like a final sense. By a coincidence is meant a false appearance, or suggestion, of relations among circumstances. But anybody who accepts that there is an underlying oneness of all things, accepts that there are no utter absences of relations among circumstances—
    Or that there are no coincidences, in the sense that there are no real discords in either colors or musical notes—
    That any two colors, or sounds, can be harmonized, by intermediately relating them to other colors, or sounds.
    And I’d not say that my question, as to what the disappearance of one Ambrose could have to do with the disappearance of another Ambrose, is so senseless. The idea of causing Ambrose Small to disappear may have had origin in somebody’s mind, by suggestion from the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce. If in no terms of physical abduction can the disappearance of Ambrose Small be explained, I’ll not say that that has any meaning, until the physicists intelligibly define what they mean by physical terms.

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    In days of yore, when I was an especially bad young one, my punishment was having to go to the store on Saturdays, and work. I had to scrape off labels of other dealers’ canned goods, and paste on my parent’s label. Theoretically, I was so forced to labor to teach me the errors of deceitful ways. A good many brats are brought up, in the straight and narrow, somewhat deviously.
    One time I had pyramids of canned goods, containing a variety of fruits and vegetables. But I had used all except peach labels. I pasted the peach labels on peach