had struck the eye
without even grazing the eyelid. The experts came to the conclusion that
if she had been murdered, or had committed suicide, she would have
blinked, and her eyelids would have been touched by the bullet. But for
this marvellous occurrence, the young Russian would have been tried for
murder, and perhaps found guilty.

An Australian of my acquaintance some years ago wrote to his broker
ordering him to sell 500 shares in the Broken Hill Mining Company. The
servant to whom the letter was given mislaid it, and only screwed up his
courage to tell his master two days later. In the meantime the shares
had gone up, and, so seeing, the Australian waited a little longer
before selling. Then came the boom. Two months after the day on which he
had ordered his broker to sell the 500 shares at 40s. apiece these
shares were worth L96. He sold, and through the carelessness of his
servant became a rich man. This is luck, if you like.

The late Edmond About, the famous French novelist, came out first of the
Normale Superieure School. As such he was entitled to be sent to the
French school at Athens for two years before being appointed professor
in some French Faculty. About had a humorous turn of mind. Instead of
studying ancient Greece at Athens, he studied the modern Greeks. After
his two years he returned with the manuscripts of two books,
'Contemporary Greece' and 'The Mountain King,' which were such successes
that he immediately resigned his professorship to devote his time to
literature. If, instead of coming out first, he had come out second, he
would never have been sent to Athens, and About would probably have
spent his life as a learned Professor of Greek or Latin at one of our
Universities.

CHAPTER VII

WE NEEDN'T GET OLD

'When my next birthday comes,' once said to me Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'I
shall be eighty years young.' And he looked it--young, cheerful, with a
kind, merry twinkle in his eyes.

'And,' I said to him, 'to what in particular do you attribute your
youth? To good health and careful living, I suppose?'

'Well, yes,' he replied, 'to a certain extent, but chiefly to a cheerful
disposition and invariable contentment, in every period of my life, with
what I was. I have never felt the pangs of ambition.'

'You needn't,' I remarked. 'The most ambitious man would have been
content with being what you have been--what you are.'

'Happiness, which has contentment for its invariable ca