course, a series of coincidences, but we never cease to be
surprised as each new one happens, and nothing can destroy their
recurring freshness. We may make mathematical calculations showing
that there is a chance in a million that such and such a thing will
happen, but, when it happens once in a million times, it seems to us
as marvellous as a comet. We cannot get accustomed to the pattern of
Nature, which repeats itself as daringly as the pattern in a
wall-paper. Our fathers recognised this pattern, and saw in it the
weird craftsmanship of destiny. We who believe in iron law, which
surely implies a rigid pattern, are by a curious want of logic
sceptics, and we treat each new emergence of the pattern as a strange
exception to scientific rule. We cannot believe that Nature arranged
howlings of dogs and disasters in the stars to accompany the death of
a Caesar or a Napoleon. Everything that we can call dramatic in Nature
we put down to chance and coincidence. Superstitious people confront
us with instance upon instance of the succession of omen and event,
but we label these exception No. 1, exception No. 2, and so forth, and
go cheerfully on our way.

Believers in omens tell us that, some time before Laud's trial and
execution, he found his portrait fallen on to the floor, and predicted
disaster; and they ask us to admit that this was more than a
coincidence, especially as there are a hundred similar stories. They
relate how the stumble of a horse proved as fatal an omen for Mungo
Park as did the fall of a picture for Laud. One day before he
departed on his last expedition to Africa his horse stumbled, and Sir
Walter Scott, who was with him, said: "I am afraid this is a bad
omen." "Omens follow those who look to them," replied the explorer,
and set forth on the expedition from which he never returned. Luckily
we have examples which suggest that Park and not Scott was right.
Everyone knows the story of William the Conqueror's fall as he landed
on the shores of England, and how, in order to calm the superstitious
alarm of his followers, he called on them to observe how he had taken
possession of the country with both hands. In the very fact of doing
so, of course, he merely substituted one interpretation of an omen for
another. But if omens are capable in this way of opposite
interpretations, we are on the direct road to scepticism about their
significance, and so to a view that most events that appear to have
been heral