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The God of Coincidence is fortunate in possessing innumerable press agents. They have made the length of his arm a proverb. How at exactly the right moment he extends it across continents and drags two and two together, thus causing four to result where but for him sixes and sevens would have obtained, they have made known to the readers of all of our best magazines. For instance, Holworthy is leaving for the Congo to find a cure for the sleeping sickness, and for himself any sickness from which one is warranted never to wake up. This is his condition because the beautiful million-heiress who is wintering at the Alexander Young Hotel in Honolulu has refused to answer his letters, cables, and appeals.

He is leaning upon the rail taking his last neck-breaking look at the Woolworth Building. The going-ashore bugle has sounded, pocket-handkerchiefs are waving; and Joe Hutton, the last visitor to leave the ship, is at the gangway.

“Good-by, Holworthy!” he calls. “Where do you keep yourself? Haven’t seen you at the club in a year!”

“Haven’t been there in a year–nor mean to!” is the ungracious reply of our hero.

“Then, for Heaven’s sake,” exclaims Hutton, “send some one to take your mail out of the H box! Every time I look for letters I wade through yours.”

“Tear them up!” calls Holworthy. “They’re bills.”

Hutton now is half-way down the gangplank.

“Then your creditors,” he shouts back, “must all live at the Alexander Young Hotel in Honolulu!”

That night an express train shrieking through the darkness carried with it toward San Francisco–

In this how evident is the fine Italian hand of the God of Coincidence!

Had Hutton’s name begun with an M; had the H in Hutton been silent; had he not carried to the Mauretania a steamer basket for his rich aunt; had he not resented the fact that since Holworthy’s election to the Van Sturtevant Club he had ceased to visit the Grill Club–a cure for sleeping sickness might have been discovered; but two loving hearts never would have been reunited and that story would not have been written.

Or, Mrs. Montclair, with a suit-case, is leaving her home forever to join handsome Harry Bellairs, who is at the corner with a racing-car and all the money of the bank of which he has been cashier. As the guilty woman places the farewell letter against the pin-cushion where her husband will be sure to find it, her infant son turns in his sleep and jabs himself with a pin. His howl of anguish resembles that of a puppy on a moonlight night. The mother recognizes her master’s voice. She believes her child dying, flies to the bedside, tears up the letter, unpacks the suit-case. The next morning at breakfast her husband, reading the newspaper, exclaims aloud:

“Harry Bellairs,” he cries, “has skipped with the bank’s money! I always told you he was not a man you ought to know.”

“His manner to me,” she says severely, “always was that of a perfect gentleman.”

Again coincidence gets the credit. Had not the child tossed–had not at the critical moment the safety pin proved untrue to the man who invented it–that happy family reunion would have been impossible.

Or, it might be told this way:

Old Man McCurdy, the Pig-Iron King, forbids his daughter Gwendolyn even to think of marrying poor but honest Beef Walters, the baseball pitcher, and denies him his house. The lovers plan an elopement. At midnight Beef is to stand at the tradesman’s entrance and whistle “Waiting at the Church”; and down the silent stairs Gwendolyn is to steal into his arms. At the very same hour the butler has planned with the policeman on fixed post to steal Mother McCurdy’s diamonds and pass them to a brother of the policeman, who is to wait at the tradesman’s entrance and whistle “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”