a child the minister is liable to forget the name, just at the moment when he ought to remember it. My father preached occasionally at the Brattle Street Church. I take this for granted, for I remember going with him on one occasion when he did so. Nothing was more likely than that he should be asked to officiate at the baptism of the younger son of his wife's first cousin, Judge Phillips. This slip was handed him to remind him of the name: He brought it home, put it in that old Bible, and there it lay quietly for nearly half a century, when, as if it had just heard of Mr. Phillips's decease, it flew from its hiding-place and startled the eyes of those who had just read his name in the daily column of deaths. It would be hard to find anything more than a mere coincidence here; but it seems curious enough to be worth telling.

   The second of these two last stories must be told in prosaic detail to show its whole value as a coincidence.

   One evening while I was living in Charles Street, I received a call from 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.

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