om for another newcomer of the lady sort. A
well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,
--pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,
--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on
the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her My record is a
blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have contrived to
make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to
appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance
before a year is out. It is very curious that she should prove connected
with a person many of us have heard of. Yet, curious as it is, I have
been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote
facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from
ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked
breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a
crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry
mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name of
her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely pillow,--a
widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for
them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and
events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if
there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar
occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case
for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence
among the Comfortable Classes. There are about as many twins in the
births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you
learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week,
that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if
it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the
blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible
connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the
fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
pleasant po