ince said that she
meant to have a society of the people who believed that sometime we
should know more about such curious coincidences. Doctor Holmes was
delighted with the idea, and we "organized" the society then and
there; he was to be president, I was to be secretary, and my mother
was to be treasurer. There were to be no other members, no entrance
fees, no constitution, and no assessments. We seldom meet now that we
do not authorize a meeting of this society and challenge each other to
produce the remarkable coincidences which have passed since we met
before.

There is an awful story of his about the last time a glove was thrown
down in an English court-room. It is a story in which Holmes is all
mixed up with a marvellous series of impossibilities, such as would
make Mr. Clemens's hair grow gray, and add a new chapter to his
studies of telepathy. I will not enter on it now, with the detail of
the book that fell from the ninth shelf of a book-case, and opened at
the exact passage where the challenge story was to be described. No, I
will not tell another word of it; for if I am started upon it, it will
take up the whole of this number of Mr. McClure's Magazine. But
sometime, when Mr. McClure wants to make the whole magazine thrill
with excitement, he will write to Doctor Holmes, and ask him for that
story of the "challenge of battle."

[Illustration: O. W. HOLMES IN HIS FAVORITE SEAT AT BEVERLY.]

As for the story of his hearing Doctor Phinney at Rome, and the other
story of Mr. Emerson's hearing Doctor Phinney at Rome, I never tell
that excepting to confidential friends who know that I cannot tell a
lie. For if I tell it to any one else, he looks at me with a quizzical
air, as much as to say, "This is as bad as the story of the 'Man
Without a Country;' and I do not know how much to believe, and how
much to disbelieve."

[1] Also called the Peter Butler house. Sewall in his diary speaks of
it as Mr. Quincy's new house (1680-85). There Dorothy was born
and married.

IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!

BY STANLEY J. WEYMAN.

On the moorland above the old gray village of Carbaix, in
Finistere--Finistere, the most westerly province of Brittany--stands a
cottage, built, as all the cottages in that country are, of rough-hewn
stones. It is a poor, rude place to-day, but it wore an aspect far
more rude and primitive a hundred years ago--say on an August day in
the year 1793, when a man issued from the d