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More "Coincidence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me; it seemed like some immortal wisdom come from another world. Remember that I was on the point of going. Nor is this all. If nothing else had happened, I might have looked upon Father Moran's visit as a coincidence. But why should the wind rise? So far as I can make out, it began to rise between eleven and twelve, at the very time I should have been swimming between Castle Island and the Joycetown shore. I know that belief in signs and ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... passage did show that one hindrance to Hamlet's action was his conscience, it by no means follows that this was the sole or the chief hindrance. And, thirdly, let him observe, and let him ask himself whether the coincidence is a mere accident, that Hamlet is here almost repeating the words he used in vain self-reproach some time before (IV. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... footlights and had fled—or had fallen—to the Black Rim country. Like many another, she had gone as far as her money would take her. That it took her to the end of the little branch railroad that stopped abruptly with its nose against a mountain twenty miles from the Devil's Tooth ranch was a coincidence,—or the whim of Fate. There she was, as strange to the outland as young Tom would have been to the city whence she had come; thinking perhaps to start life afresh in some little Western town; with no money to carry her back to the outskirts ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... first of Ibsen's plays in which the puppets have no visible wires." It may even be said that it was the first modern drama in which no wires had been employed. Not that even here the execution is perfect, as Ibsen afterwards made it. The arm of coincidence is terribly shortened, and the early acts, clever and entertaining as they are, are still far from the inevitability of real life. But when, in the wonderful last act, Nora issues from her bedroom, dressed ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... inexplicable and half-superstitious uneasiness that this coincidence awakened in Mulrady's unimaginative mind, he was almost on the point of disclosing his good fortune to the driver, in order to prove how preposterous was the parallel, but checked ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... transported thence several hundred miles to its present site. It measures sixty-eight feet in height, and is not less than eight feet square at its base—one solid shaft of granite; but this is exceeded by the one still at Thebes, which is a hundred feet high. It struck me as a notable coincidence that the ingenious Frenchman who first proved the truth of the supposed hieroglyphic alphabet should have done so by assuming that the name repeated so frequently upon a certain stone extolling the virtues of Ptolemy Soter, must be that of the ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... Mr. Barker deplored this coincidence, which put a stop to "Attila." "But have you never yourself been the victim of these odd coincidences, and, just as you had fixed upon a subject or a title, found yourself superseded—a thing next in atrocity ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... adequate knowledge of itself, nor of its body, nor of external bodies, but only a confused knowledge, as often as it perceives things in the common order of Nature, that is to say, as often as it is determined to the contemplation of this or that externally—namely, by a chance coincidence, and not as often as it is determined internally—for the reason that it contemplates several things at once, and is determined to understand in what they differ, agree, or oppose one another; for whenever it is internally disposed in this or in ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... nature, that now when her trouble had overtaken her, and that she had lost the love which had suddenly sprung from her heart—full-grown and clad in power as Athena sprang from the head of Jove—Jess had no further inclination to use her divine gift of song. Probably it was nothing more than a coincidence, although a ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... answer. He was, in fact, looking towards the doorway, and the group on the porch were surprised to see a gleam of mirthful understanding start in his eyes. An answering gleam was in Victoria's, who had at that moment, by a singular coincidence, come out of the house. She came directly down the steps and out on the gravel, and held her hand to him in the buggy, and he flushed with pleasure as he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the paradoxes of the situation, both in Austria and in Germany, is the coincidence of the great gold hunt, which is clearing out the trinkets of the humblest, with the roaring trade in jewelry in Berlin and Vienna. As an instance I can vouch for the ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... of this find meaning anything at all to her against the coincidence of another author using the quotation in writing a scenario. She did not know what to think. Which supposition was the ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... population are distributed pretty regularly along the line, so that their influences are nearly equalized. But occasionally some large impulse may serve to start a swing and if this impulse is somewhat regularly repeated, it may serve to keep up the rhythmic motion. True, the lack of coincidence in the impact of various influences which occur accidentally, such as political changes, wars, and the rapid opening of new routes of transportation, would serve to hasten or to retard, perhaps for a time quite to alter, what would otherwise ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... as due to hysteria, and in a small number of instances there are signs which justify such an explanation. But in the larger proportion the mode of origin is complex, and depends on the coincidence of a variety of evils, none of which are of hysterical character. I am not here concerned so much with the exact nature of these troubles as I am with the avoidable errors in the management of sick childhood. If I can ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... this coincidence of names there ran through his mind one of those snatches of song which Hervey Willetts was ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... As I noted how the main bunch of roses and lilies was connected by long satin ribbons to the lesser clusters which hung from it, I recalled with conceivable horror the use to which a similar ribbon had been put in the room below. In the shudder called up by this coincidence I forgot to speculate how a bouquet carried by the bride could have found its way back to this upstairs room when, as all accounts agree, she had fled from the parlor below without speaking or staying foot the moment she was told of the catastrophe which had taken place in the library. ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... too, and the coincidence gave colour to the rest of the woman's tale, as would have happened if the whole story had been an invention instead of being quite true. Nella was combing the girl's thick hair, an operation peculiarly conducive to a maid's chattering, for she ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... savage passion, "you are aware, I believe, that the immortal gods have a hand in human affairs: what did they do but lead these scoundrels aboard this ship in ignorance of the owner and then warn each of us alike, by a coincidence of dreams, of what they had done? Can you then see how it would be possible to let off those whom a god has, himself, delivered up to punishment? I am not a cruel man; what moves me is this: I am afraid I shall have to endure myself whatever I ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... that at Billinsgate, they had a new Wallfleet Oyster bed. The fact that Wallfleet oysters were marketed at Billinsgate, always the big fish market of the Londoners, and that our Wellfleet was at first known as Billingsgate, seems more than a mere coincidence. ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... and as there didn't seem any real need of grieving because there was no one to meet me, I thought I might as well enjoy myself. I did. I could not help the train being late, and I didn't forget to mail my letter on purpose; and it was an accident, or coincidence, that a nice man should be on the same train I was, who lived in the place I was going to spend the summer in, and knew very well the house I wanted to get to. I didn't know he had been engaged to the niece of the house and hadn't been to the latter ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... purchaser.' It is difficult to say which is most astounding, the law or the morals of this position. At all events, 'the foreign holders' of Confederate bonds are informed by Jefferson Davis, that this is the law. Indeed it is a singular coincidence, that one of the objections made to the payment of the Union Bank bonds by the Governor, was, as he alleged, 'the monstrous assumption of power on the part of the bank, in seeking to monopolize the cotton crop of the State, and becoming a factor and shipper of our great staple.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... curious coincidence! I was about to tender you the same advice, Sir Robert," I told ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... a curious coincidence, but you never seemed to me more delicious or more lasciviously excellent in your fucking than you did just now. As it is but once let us take more care in future, and hope nothing will come of this little and ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... Thompson had felt an impulse to speak to the man that morning. If any legitimate excuse had offered he would have done so. To find the man apparently at home on the boat in which he himself was taking brief passage was a coincidence of which Thompson proceeded to take immediate advantage. He climbed into the cockpit. The man ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... forty-five. By a strange coincidence Mr. Carve has suggested to me that we set out for England to-morrow. At Dover I will telegraph you with a rendezvous. In great haste. Till then, my dear ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... a moment, Mr. Henry Bannerworth did incidentally mention something of the sort. It's a most singular coincidence." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the Orchestra—quite a coincidence, isn't it? You were so absorbed, you see!—No, I won't keep you out here, thanks; my sister will take care ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... as if he were talking to himself: "It is ver-y singular. Yes... very strange. A curious coincidence." Then he began to ask questions, and went over the whole ground from the beginning, we answering. By and by he said: "Eleven hundred and six ducats. It is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... were now opening to them. In conclusion, he admitted in their full extent the reasons which had been given by the noble lords for their several resignations, and the statements which they had made in accounting for that remarkable coincidence; but he could not help expressing his surprise that government had been able to go on so long, being conducted, as it now appeared, by ministers who did not think proper to communicate with one another upon the most important question ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... chamber, I said nothing of all this. He was, by an odd coincidence, looking over a portfolio of Fayal sketches made by himself during his late voyage. Among them were a dozen studies of just such capotes as I had seen,—some in profile, completely screening the wearer, others disclosing women's faces, old or young. He seemed to ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... presented to us respecting its symptoms and its course, yet these are sufficient to throw light upon the form of the malady, and they are worthy of credence, from their coincidence with the signs of the same ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... is a language of flowery metaphors. It means, I suppose, that when you touch the drums they bite. In journeying from one spot to another they always leave misfortune behind, as I understand it. Just coincidence; but you couldn't drive that into an Oriental skull. This is what makes the study of precious stones so interesting. There is always some enchantment, some evil spell. To handle the drums is to invite a minor accident. Call it twaddle; probably ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... the coat? Ah! true, the colour is lilac.' He held it out at arm's length. Doubtless I had been staring at the coat, but I had not even given it a thought. 'The lilac shadow!' he went on, with a sneer. 'Believe me, it is the purest coincidence.' And as he prepared to slip his arm into the sleeve I flashed the knife out of my belt. He was too quick for me, however. He flung the coat over my head. I felt the knife twisted out of my hand; he stumbled ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... "Is this another coincidence?" he asked. "Did the man who left you his clothes and the barred silk handkerchief and the tight shoes leave you ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... character which it is impossible to mistake. What shall we think of him who never differed from a certain set of men until the moment they lost their power, and who never agreed with them in a single instance afterwards? Would not such a coincidence of interest and opinion be rather fortunate? Would it not be an extraordinary cast upon the dice that a man's connections should degenerate into faction, precisely at the critical moment when they ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... last, is an action of unseen, uncomprehended forces which can be made the subject of actual experiment. Nay, more, the very fact that in this special direction experiment turns out to be possible, is in itself an augury that we are on a true scientific track; for it involves a remarkable coincidence between a theoretical conclusion and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... "What a delightful coincidence! We were girls together at Albany. You must remember Judge Warne?" she said, turning to Mr. Langhope, who, twirling his white moustache, murmured, a shade less cordially: ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... flashed into his mind. It was no coincidence that he had a copy of the very book to which his unknown correspondent referred him. For the note had been written in this very room, on stationery conveniently at hand, on the noiseless typewriter which had been far more considerate about ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... one of the party of four in our compartment. Great was his joy when a conjuring trick of coincidence revealed that the jolly sister who came to ask what we would like to drink proved to be not only a Canadian, but actually from his own little township in Manitoba. While they discussed mutual friends the rest of us felt highly ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... anticipated in pointing out this fact by the author of the biographical essay on "Spenser" in this series—an essay to which I cannot help taking this opportunity of offering a tribute of sincere admiration. It may not be an undesigned coincidence that the inconsolable widower of the "Daphnaida" is named Alcyon, while Chaucer's poem begins with a reference to the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone. Sir Arthur Gorges re-appears in Alcyon in "Colin Clout's come home again."); but it is ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... before I had seen his picture in our Sunday-school quarterly, and now, confused in my eyes with the dancing trees, I saw him, as I had seen him in the picture, suspended from a limb by his long hair, quietly waiting to be taken down. There was something more than a mere coincidence in that Sunday-school lesson. Here was another warning neglected. With Mr. Pound and Stacy Shunk, Miss Spinner took a place as a prophetess. She had taught me that boys who mocked their respectable elders were eaten by bears, and I believed her. She had demonstrated ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... and no doubt, if she thought it would flatter, would tell, a beautiful young girl that her destiny was to be a queen; but there is in this prediction a minuteness of detail, that cannot be accounted for on the ground of accidental coincidence. It is a brief history of her life. Unless we are prepared to believe that an ignorant old mulatto woman was gifted by divine Providence with supernatural power, constituted a second Witch of Endor, and able by "examining ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... Mabel was married to Sir Hubert, we cannot take it upon us to say. At any rate, we prefer the Scotch poet's description, as somewhat the more pithy, and graphic, and intelligible of the two. The coincidence, however, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... odd coincidence that Baroni should be acquainted both with Miss de Gervais and with Errington, and at her next lesson she ventured to comment on the former's visit. Baroni's answer, however, furnished a perfectly simple ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... strange coincidence through which the fame of the Dyn Hyspys became greatly increased. An event of this kind is related by Mr. Edward ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... intelligence, but he also has a singular capacity for perpetrating dreadful blunders. Over in the town of Nockamixon one of the churches last year called a clergyman named Rev. Joseph Striker. In the same place, by a most unfortunate coincidence, resides also a prize-fighter named Joseph Striker, and rumors were afloat a few weeks ago that the latter Joseph was about to engage in a contest with a Jersey pugilist for the championship. Our sheriff considered it his duty to warn Joseph against the proposed ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... appearance of so large a comet as is now interesting the astronomical world, almost contemporaneously with our victory in Egypt, would have been looked upon as an omen of great portent, and it is a curious coincidence that the first glimpse Sir Garnet Wolseley had of this erratic luminary was when standing, on the eventful morning of September 13, 1882, watch in hand, before the intrenchments of Tel-el-Kebir, waiting to give the word to advance. As may be seen in our sketch, the comet ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... Chris," Lute said. "You know that. It's merely coincidence that two horses in two days should have ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... automatically, like marionettes, the one from pleasure, the other from surprise. Had he seen? Had he noticed? The light blue eyes stared coolly ahead. For pure callous indifference their expression could not have been beaten. Coincidence! Nothing more. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... newspaper correspondent," Duncombe said. "He has many interests and many friends with whom he is constantly exchanging information. It is a coincidence, I admit. But the wildest flight of imagination could not make any more ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... replied: "The coincidence of circumstances which led to this auspicious crisis, the confidence reposed in me by my fellow-citizens, and the assistance I may expect from counsels which will be dictated by an enlarged and liberal policy, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... mentioned the birrus of Laodicea, an imitation of the birrus of the Nervii, which was a very fine linen cloth, worn by ladies of fashion. Laodicea was one of the most ancient centres of Oriental textile fabrics; the Nervii were one of the most remote of the Gallic peoples, living—the coincidence is noteworthy—about where Flanders is now. If at Laodicea they made at the end of the third century an imitation of Nervian linen, that means that the Nervii had succeeded in manufacturing and finding market for cloth so desirable as to rouse the Laodiceans, competing for trade, to ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... only we must restrict intellect to the comparing or interlacing of single perceptions.' But man transcends in his mental powers the barriers of the brute intellect at a point which coincides with the starting-point of language. And in this coincidence Professor Mueller endeavors to find a sufficiently fundamental explanation of the problem of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... variations, and the public declaration of the calendar for each year, was a very serious and important task, affecting all kinds of legal contracts. The pontiffs to whom the duty was assigned abused their power for political ends, and so little care had they taken to regulate the civil year and keep it in coincidence with the solar year that in the time of Julius Caesar the civil equinox differed from the astronomical by three months, the real spring equinox occurring, not at the end of what was called March by the calendar, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that she was travelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over Withers and ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... hinted that Narcissus, like the Catholic Church, worshipped many saints. At this time, one of them, by a thrilling coincidence, chanced to have her shrine at a boarding-school, some fifteen miles or so from the mill-pond on whose banks the Miller's Daughter had drawn into her lovely face so much of the beauty of the world. Alice Sunshine, shall we call ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... when we had altered the inscriptions on the trees. The gale which had wrecked the pirate had driven the Triton somewhat to the southward of her course for the Bonins, whither she was bound to look for us; and thus, by a wonderful coincidence, she appeared at the very moment her coming was of most importance to rescue us from slavery, if not, more probably, from ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... the stranger. "Well, it is a curious coincidence, but neither am I alone—I have brought a little lad here to show him the cathedral—he has gone into the Whispering Gallery, and I am waiting for him. Perhaps your friends have also gone into the gallery. While we are both waiting, shall we look round this delightful ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... great when we discovered Captain Wedderburn dressed out in the garb of a Junker of the middle ages, and "bonny Girzie Sinclair," the Laird of Roslin's daughter, masquerading as a German Frauelein. The coincidence, if it be not plagiary, is so curious, that we have translated the ballad with a much freer hand than usual, confessing at the same time that the advantage, in point of humour and gallantry, is clearly on the side ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... said Tom, "they must very well have known my phiz, as I have been sketched and caricatured all over the shop. When I told them who I was they had the decency to let me go. They thought they'd scored off me enough, I reckon. Yes, it certainly is a strange coincidence that I might actually have had something to do with the poor fellow's death, which has cut me up as much as anybody; though if they had known I had just come from the 'scene of the crime,' and actually lived in the house, they would probably have—let me alone." He laughed ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... examples among others which he brings to explain the better what he means by his first philosophy. The first is this axiom, "If to unequals you add equals, all will be unequal." This, he says, is an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics; and he asks whether there is not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion. But I would ask in my turn whether the certainty that any arithmetician or geometrician has of the arithmetical or geometrical truth will lead him to discover this coincidence. ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... Luke, 'I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected,' 'I must walk to-day and to-morrow and the day following,' points to the very duration of our Lord's ministry, as indicated by the fourth Gospel. If so, the coincidence is the more remarkable because it does not appear that St. Luke himself, while wording these prophetic words, was aware of ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... Feast of Dedication. What was he doing—outside the Ghetto gates—in that great, dark, narrow-meshed city of Rome, defying the Papal law, and of all nights in the year on that sinister night when, by a coincidence of chronology, the Christian persecutor celebrated the birth of his Saviour? Through misty eyes she saw her husband's face, stern and rugged, yet made venerable by the flowing white of his locks and beard, as with the supernumerary taper he prepared to light the wax candles in the nine-branched ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... general use, embroidered hangings mostly disappeared. Whatever may have been the cause, there is no doubt of the coincidence. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg's wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia—undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) only ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... only what K. had suspected before. But a sense of impending danger to Sidney obsessed him. If Carlotta would do that, what would she do when she learned of the engagement? And he had known her before. He believed she was totally unscrupulous. The odd coincidence of their paths ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... fallen from his tie. He was maladroit about picking it up, trying with thumb and forefinger to seize the pin itself, instead of the more readily grasped design of small pearls at the top, so that he pushed it a little deeper into the gravel; and then occurred a tiny coincidence: the elderly man, passing, let fall the apple from his hand, and it rolled toward the pin just as Corliss managed to secure the latter. For an instant, though the situation was so absolutely commonplace, so casual, Cora had a ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... I see! What a strange coincidence, Mr. Wilfer, that I should see your really admirable Rubens in the afternoon, and run against—or perhaps I should say, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... they met people from home—the McGanums. They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable strangers absurdly ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... was faded and dim; but he saw again the child's eyes lifted to it—the lips half-parted, the eager question and swift demand—that he should tell her of Athens and the Parthenon—and the same love and the wonder that dwelt in his own heart for the city of his birth. It was a strange coincidence that the child should have come to him. Perhaps she was the one soul in the great, hurrying city who could care. They did not understand—these hurrying, breathless men and women—how a heart could ache for something ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... ally Petion should be the chief. We know from his own nauseating account of his conduct while journeying back from Varennes to Paris with the unfortunate royal family, how unbridled were Petion's dreams of his own probable share in this regency; and by a very curious coincidence a passage in the diary of Gouverneur Morris confirms, on the authority of Vicq d'Azyr, the Queen's physician, Petion's odious revelations of his own ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... Cape Jervis, has been furnished me by the kindness of Mr. Kent, who accompanied the lamented officer to whom the further exploration of that part of coast unhappily proved fatal. There is a melancholy coincidence between Captain Barker's death and that of Captain Cook, which cannot fail to interest the public, as the information that has been furnished will call for their serious consideration. I shall leave for their proper place, the remarks I ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... permitted to control the Congress or the Executive, but have only such influence as the force of its reasoning may discover. It is believed that this part of the message, which gave scandal to legalists, was supplied by Taney, the Attorney-General. It is a curious coincidence, if this be so, that more than twenty years later we shall find another great President, though bred in the anti-Jacksonian Whig tradition, compelled to take up much the same attitude in regard to a Supreme Court ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... It is a coincidence, accidental, yet noteworthy for its significance, that the date of the first hostile action against the United States, July 31, was also that of the official promulgation of treaties of peace between Great ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... It was merely coincidence that a near flash of lightning flamed from the heavens as she lifted the knife,—but it inspired every Indian to a crashing ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... doubt with a cynical eye on possible black-type headlines of future domestic discord. Among those mentioned by the enterprising society reporters of the papers had been the same Miss Violet Winslow whose picture I had admired. Evidently Garrick had recognized the coincidence. ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... been convicted but for a curious coincidence: A dissipated young lawyer, named Sydney Carton, sitting in the court room, had noticed with surprise that he himself looked very much like the prisoner; in fact, that they were so much alike they might almost have been taken for twin brothers. He called the attention of Darnay's lawyer to ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... most notable political action of the Fair Play settlers is their declaration of independence, which Meginness calls "a remarkable coincidence" because "it took place about the same time that the Declaration was signed in Philadelphia!"[42] Aware, as were many of the American colonists in the spring and summer of 1776, that independence was being debated in Philadelphia, these West Branch pioneers decided to absolve themselves ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... try it out!" he exclaimed suddenly, gripped by the amazing coincidence between this case and that so aptly described by Hugo. "I said I would if ever I had a chance. It worked miracles in the story; perhaps it may in real life, Anyway, it's going to be worth while, and give me a heap of enjoyment ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... to a useless martyrdom without averting the fall of his priory. It may be mentioned, as having some bearing on our history, that part of the wealth released by the Act was applied to the foundation of six new bishoprics, thus by a strange coincidence bringing up the English dioceses to the number of twenty-four, originally fixed upon by Pope Gregory the Great, while his successor was set at defiance by the measures through which they ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... strikingly suggestive of the Elephant Mound of Wisconsin, with the peculiarities of which the sculptor, whether ancient or modern, might almost be supposed to have been acquainted. It certainly must be looked upon as a curious coincidence that carvings found at a point so remote from the Elephant Mound, and presumably the work of other hands, should so closely copy the imperfections ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... secondly, as the tutelary emblem under which his conquering legions had so often obeyed his voice; and, thirdly, as the bird of Jove. To this triple relation of the bird his dream covertly appears to point. And a singular coincidence appears between this dream and a little anecdote brought down to us, as having actually occurred in Rome about twenty-four hours before his death. A little bird, which by some is represented as a very small kind of sparrow, but which, both to the Greeks and the Romans, was known by a ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... seemed, had driven him into exile at the age of ten, because of his liberal opinions; since when he had travelled the world for his instruction and pleasure... a philosopher prince. By a remarkable coincidence the prince had spent three years in Tarascon, but when Tartarin expressed astonishment at never having seen him at the club or on the promonade, "I didn't go out much" Said the prince in a somewhat evasive manner, and Tartarin discretely asked no more questions. Important ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... thought that they both knew everything, but she seemed so calm and quiet, that I set aside my suspicions, and thought it was only some strange coincidence, as I could not believe in such dissimulation on her part, and so, after half-an-hour's friendly talk, which was, however, interrupted a dozen times by her little girl coming in and out of the room. I went away, very much annoyed. Just imagine the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... wasn't a certainty. This mother and daughter were always together. What was to befall the one might anywhere—anywhere—befall the other. But a like fate, in an equally near future, was in store for that other lady. The coincidence was curious, very. Here we all were together—here, they and I—I who was narrowly to escape, so soon now, what they, so soon now, were to suffer. Oh, there was an inference to be drawn. Not a sure inference, I told myself. And always I was talking, talking, and the train was swinging and swaying ...
— A. V. Laider • Max Beerbohm
... she neared the city; whereupon she fired three guns to leeward, hoisted the private signal, and showed the Union Jack. Then, at last, a cheer went up that told both friend and foe of British victory and American defeat. By a strange coincidence the parole for this triumphal day was St George, while the parole appointed for the victorious New Year's Eve had been St Denis; so that the patron saints of France and England happen to be associated with the two great days on which the stronghold ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... as if to strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight at the same time,—the woman insensible from the fright. Her child, born some little time afterward, was club-footed. However—on second thought,—if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... eyes lighted on an account of this very affair—Abraham Thornton's challenge to battle when he was accused of murder, in 1817. According to Mark Twain, Dr. Holmes was disposed to accept "Mental Telegraphy" rather than mere chance as the cause of this coincidence. Yet the anecdote of the challenge seems to have been a favourite of his. It occurs in, "The Professor," in the fifth section. Perhaps he told it pretty frequently; probably that is why the printed version was sent to him; still, he was a little staggered by the coincidence. There ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... (except in the formal titles to some of them) told in the first person by Jeremiah himself,(39) while from 604-3 onwards the biographical narratives are much more numerous and, except in three of them,(40) the Prophet appears only in the third person. This coincidence of the first appearance of Baruch as the Prophet's associate with the start of a numerous series of narratives of the Prophet's life in which he appears in the third person can hardly ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... exactly the way I feel!" Lemuel was proud of the coincidence. He said, to commend himself further to Miss Carver, "I have just ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... from some odd coincidence with the name of their authors. Thus, De Saussay has written a folio volume, consisting of panegyrics of persons of eminence whose Christian names were Andrew; because Andrew was his own name. Two Jesuits made a similar collection of illustrious men whose Christian names were Theophilus ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... "The Marble Faun" is original sin. It is a story of the fall of man, told again in the light of modern science. It is a wonderful coincidence that almost in the same months that Hawthorne was writing this romance, Charles Darwin was also finishing his work on the "Origin of Species;" for one is the moral counterpart of the other. Hawthorne did ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... was with Mr. Leroux, and Mr. John Exel, M. P., at the time that the murder was discovered. The executors of the late Mr. Horace Vernon are faced with extraordinary difficulties in administering the will of the deceased, owing to the tragic coincidence of his wife's murder within twenty-four ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... he said, "I believe that she has reasons for desiring her present whereabouts to remain unknown. I should perhaps not have mentioned her name at all. It was, I fancy, indiscreet of me. The coincidence of hearing you mention the name of the place where I believe she resided surprised my question. With your permission we will ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lest his own senses gave him false intelligence, and that he had really assumed some frightful and revolting shape. It was curious that, partly by his own fault, and largely, no doubt, through the operation of mere coincidence, he was once or twice strongly confirmed in this fantastic delusion. He came one day into a lonely and unfrequented byway, a country lane falling into ruin, but still fringed with elms that had formed an avenue leading to the old manor-house. It was now the road of communication ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the most rational explanation of the cause of the earth's elliptical orbit that I have ever seen in print. It is because the earth presents its watery hemisphere to the sun at one time and that of solid land the other; but why has he made his Oxonian astonished at the coincidence? It is what I taught in my attic ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... locked up in the new church, now so nearly completed, on the spot where they picked up the eagle! How shall it be dedicated to Desmotes in Desmotes' lifetime? Were it not a most blissful and appropriate coincidence if the day of the consecration were that of the saint's migration to a better world? I shall submit this view of the case to my uncle: he is accustomed to hear reason from me, of whom, between ourselves, he is not a little afraid. Thou mayest rely upon it that about the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... pierced with most beautiful patterns, some quite Gothic, but the majority almost Moorish in design, not unlike the slabs in the circles over the cloister arcades at Alcobaca, but though this is probably only a coincidence, still more like those at Tarragona in ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... mariner; [144:1] and it can be shewn that, with such a gale as was then blowing, the sea still dashes with amazing violence against the very same point of land off which Paul and his companions were that night labouring. In the depth of the water at the place there is another most remarkable coincidence. We are told that the sailors "sounded and found it twenty fathoms, and when they had gone a little farther, they sounded, and found it fifteen fathoms." [144:2] "But what," observes a modern writer, "are the soundings at this point? They are ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... name was Zaphnath-paaneah, meaning a revealer of secrets! When I heard that name this morning, I thought it was strangely familiar. Pharaoh called him that when he appointed him ruler, because he had interpreted his dream," I said, just realizing the very peculiar coincidence. ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... Solitude, where he had fought the good fight and won it, and invited him to take up the breast-plate of faith that now fell off his own shrunken body, Clement said within himself: "Heaven itself led my foot hither to this end." It struck him, too, as no small coincidence that his patron, St. Bavon, was a hermit, and an austere one, a cuirassier of the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... and father which gave him a horror of human love was now renewed. It was renewed, moreover, with the light of a miracle to throw it into high relief. And this miracle could not be explained away as a coincidence, but was an old-fashioned miracle that required no psychical buttressing, a hard and fast miracle able to withstand any criticism. It was a pity that out of regard for Esther he could not publish it for the encouragement of the faithful and the ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... some reason for Florent's presence, and at the same time avoid exciting the suspicion of the police. He told them that in order to return to France he had availed himself of the papers of a poor fellow who had died in his arms at Surinam from yellow fever. By a singular coincidence this young fellow's ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... spoken for /me,/ and I sensed a strange secret service intrigue around me. Then, in an instant this impression, which had got the better of my common sense, gave way. Evidently a pure coincidence. Still I was left with the vague apprehension that they were going to notice that I /knew,/ and were going ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... front of the church quacks used to harangue the mob and give advice gratis. Westminster elections are held also on the same spot—that's a coincidence. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... his chin. "By the Lord Harry," says he, "'tis a case that lacks precedents! But the coincidence of the Christian names is devilish awkward; the service takes no cognizance of surnames; and I have merely united a ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... precept may be noted. It was not coincidence merely, but related cause and effect, that Ferdinand Foch was one of the ablest military writers of the twentieth century before he won immortality on the field of war, that the elder von Moltke was as skilled with ink as with powder, and that we still ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Gaston Max, foremost criminologist in Europe, who now lay dead and mutilated in an East-End mortuary? The telephone message which had summoned Dunbar away had been too opportune to be regarded as a mere coincidence. Mlle. Dorian was, therefore, an accomplice ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... strode off. The tinker watched him as he had watched Leonard, and then dogged the uncle as he had dogged the nephew. I don't presume to say that there was cause and effect in what happened that night, but it was what is called "a curious coincidence" that that night one of Richard Avenel's ricks was set on fire; and that that day he had called Mr. Sprott an incendiary. Mr. Sprott was a man of very high spirit and did not forgive an insult easily. His nature was inflammatory, and so was that of the lucifers which he ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... his supremacy in the state, had laid before him this great manual for his guidance. Caesar evinced the deepest respect for Varro, and must have carefully studied his views. At least it can be no mere coincidence that Augustus, in carrying out his predecessor's plans for the restoration of public worship, should have followed so closely on the lines which we see from Augustine Varro struck out. To consider Varro's labours as undirected to any practical object would be to misinterpret them altogether. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... was born on the same day as the Count of Chambord, the 29th of September, 1820. He was greatly struck with this coincidence, indulging himself in a vague dream, in which he established a connection between the king's return to France and his own private fortunes. He never said exactly what he was expecting, but he led people ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... these developments. They took some time to come to formation. Although the converter was ready by September 1862, the blowing engine was not completed until the spring of 1864 and the first "blow" successfully made in 1864. It may be no more than a coincidence that the start of production seems to have been impossible before the arrival in this country of a young man, L. M. Hart, who had been trained in Bessemer operations at the plant of the Jackson Brothers at St. Seurin ...
— The Beginnings of Cheap Steel • Philip W. Bishop
... volume, is the result of many years of labour. Thousands of children have been attentively observed, and for the necessities that arose in their instruction, provision has been made. Others have doubtless reached some of the conclusions at which I have arrived, but this is only another instance of the coincidence in judgment and effort, often discoverable in persons far apart, whose attention has been directed to similiar subjects; but with the exception of the elliptical plan, devised by Dr. Gilchrist, I am not aware that ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... Gospel of St. Mark. That the development should have been on the same lines in all essential matters of symbol and (in the most important respects) of doctrine, modified only by Eastern habits of thought and environment, is a miracle of coincidence which cannot be paralleled in the world unless it be granted that Christianity filtering along the great trade routes of an earlier world joined hands with Buddhism in many unsuspected ways and places. Evidence is accumulating that this is so, and in a measure at present almost incredible. And if ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... Revolution. Accordingly, we find that all these great European characters—for so they all are more or less—made the all-important passage from youth into manhood during the ferment of the years that followed that ominous date, 1789. This coincidence explains the celebrity of the famous biographical year 1769—Walter Scott was born in that year, Wellington and Napoleon, as every body knows—and the elder Aristarchus of the Romantic school, the translator of Shakspeare, Augustus William Von Schlegel was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... responsible for the lamentable death of Prince Robin. The people were to be given swift, uncontrovertible proof that he had no hand in the unforeseen transactions of the anarchists, who, he would make it appear, had by curious coincidence elected to kill the Prince almost at the very hour when he planned to seize ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... and the presence of M. Fauchelevent in the barricade, was a coincidence which occurred to him. He pointed out ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... background, from which position he winked occasionally at the parson over the minister's shoulder. "Ah, Robarts, delighted to see you. How odd, by the by, that your brother should be my private secretary!" Mark said that it was a singular coincidence. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... from the same vital mood, into the most diverse and incommunicable images. Interlocutors speaking prose, on the contrary, pelt and besiege one another with a peripheral attack; they come into contact at sundry superficial points and thence push their agreement inwards, until perhaps a practical coincidence is arrived at in their thought. Agreement is produced by controlling each mind externally, through a series of checks and little appeals to possible sensation; whereas in poetry the agreement, where it exists, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Feminine softness and delicacy were in this lovely creature deliciously combined with an appearance of health and abounding physical vitality too often lacking in the maidens with whom alone I could compare her. It was a coincidence trifling in comparison with the general strangeness of the situation, but still striking, that her name should ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... accident—extraordinarily and suspiciously opportune for Dudley as it would have been—could not be altogether ruled out but for the further circumstance that Lady Robert had removed everybody from Cumnor on that day. To what can this point—unless we accept an altogether incredible chain of coincidence—but to some such ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... figure of speech transferred from the sphere of mathematics, may be doubted. That Plato and the most subtle philosopher of the nineteenth century should have lighted upon the same notion, is a singular coincidence of ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... was Juste-Romain-Cyrille, and their ages were identical—forty-seven years. This coincidence caused them satisfaction, but surprised them, each having thought the other much older. They next vented their admiration for Providence, whose ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... very day on which the law about me was carried. I arrived at Brundisium on the 5th of August. There my dear Tulhiola met me on what was her own birthday, which happened also to be the name-day of the colony of Brundisium and of the temple of Safety, near your house. This coincidence was noticed and celebrated with warm congratulations by the citizens of Brundisium. On the 8th of August, while still at Brundisium, I learnt by a letter from Quintus that the law had been passed at the comitia centuriata with a surprising enthusiasm on the part of all ages and ranks, and ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... seems strange, indeed," said Richard, "as showing she attached importance to the affair herself. It was a most curious coincidence, to say the least of it. But what is this Flying Dutchman, of which you also spoke? I did not know he ever came so far out of ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... Those who hold that the sacraments do not cause grace save by a certain coincidence, deny the sacraments any power that is itself productive of the sacramental effect, and hold that the Divine power assists the sacraments and produces their effect. But if we hold that a sacrament is an instrumental cause of grace, we must needs allow that there is in the sacraments ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... domain of pathology, which is as doomful as you please; but in our ordinary modern life ninety per cent. of the tragedies are determined by sheer million to one fortuities. The history of our great criminal trials, for instance, is a romance of coincidence. It is your melodramatist and not your Aristotelian purist that knows what he's talking about when he writes a play. He only has to look about him and draw what happens in real life. That there may be an Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging human destinies is another question. I am neither ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... you a second Letter (which will reach you, I suppose, by the same Post as that which I posted on Thursday Jan. 22) to tell you that not half an hour after I had posted that first Letter, arrived yours! And now, to make the Coincidence stranger, your Brother Charles, who is now with us for two days, tells me that very Thursday Jan. 24 (? 22) is your Birthday! I am extremely obliged to you for your long, kind, and interesting Letter: yes, yes: I should have liked to be on the Voyage ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... and there I lay thinking of you, spending your nights up here all alone, and no one to look after you. I wondered what you could be doing and what might be happening to you. I said to myself at once, 'Either this is a coincidence or the caper sauce.' But I made sure it was you. I felt I MUST do something anyhow, and up I came just as soon as ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... She told me over again the story that little Doris had told me of the big Daddy who had felt the call to go to France in the Y.M.C.A. to help the poor "coolies," several hundred of whom were, by strange coincidence, going back to China on the same boat with us, and with that brave mother and those dear children. These "coolies" were going back alive, but he who went to serve them died. "Others he saved; Himself he could not save," echoed in my soul as ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... a coincidence—an odd coincidence. When the ship tossed in an unusually rough crossing he was prepared to admit to himself that it was an ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... a free agent and at liberty to go where he willed. If it so chanced that his fancy took him to the city of Matanzas at the same time O'Reilly happened to be traveling thither, the circumstance might be put down to the long arm of coincidence. If his company were distasteful to the elder man, O'Reilly was free to wait and follow later; it was a matter of complete indifference to Jacket. He had business in Matanzas and he proposed to attend to it. The boy lied gravely, unblushingly. Nevertheless, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... prominent Englishman noted for boasting of his ancestry. Taking a coin from his pocket, the Englishman said: "My great-great-grandfather was made a lord by the king whose picture you see on this shilling." "Indeed!" replied the governor, smiling, as he produced another coin. "What a coincidence! My great-great-grandfather was made an angel by the Indian whose picture you see ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... American mountaineer was not living, stood, uninterested spectators of each other; and, each, unconscious why they had been permitted to enter the same cabin. The Christian student of American history cannot pass by this simple circumstance without seeing Heaven's wisdom in such a coincidence; namely, Kit Carson for the first time in sixteen years bending his steps to his boyhood home just as his sixteen years of mountaineer skill and experience were required by one of the master workmen of American Engineering, about to enter upon the exploration of inland ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... Christ Church. "The word 'belfry' is derived from the French '/bel/— beautiful, meet,' and from the German '/frei/—free, unfettered, safe.' Thus the word is strictly equivalent to 'meat-safe,' to which the new belfry bears a resemblance so perfect as almost to amount to coincidence." ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... I was trying to avoid," said Billy. "Don't you call being shot at sunset a serious complication? Or would that be just a coincidence, too? You're ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... of it when he bowed to me. I little fancied—but there was another odd coincidence—wasn't it? In general I never go into the drawing-room to company, because there are three older; but the day they came to speak to papa about the fishing, mamma and all the elder ones were out of the way, except Matilda. I was ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Scotland, during the same years was more than once subject to invasion from the same ancient enemy. Malcolm II., and the brave usurper Macbeth, fought several engagements with the northern leaders, and generally with brilliant success. By a remarkable coincidence, the Scottish chronicles also date the decadence of Danish power on their coasts from 1014, though several engagements were fought ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... little too much of a coincidence in connection with the fact that Miss Torrance and I were known to be good friends, and the time she left Cedar. As the cattle-men have evidently found out, I have crossed the bridge at about the same time ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... coincidence in this custom with regard to the dead will be found in a subjoined extract from a letter sent to me by an officer of the Beagle, together with a skeleton which he had found at Cygnet Bay. The skeleton has been presented to the Royal ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... the understanding that it was to be drunk only when it could be carried under the Thames, having been opened and enjoyed by the company, to the health of Her Majesty and the infant Prince. It was remarked, too, as a singular coincidence, that a seal on one of the corks bore the impress of the Prince of Wales's feathers, a circumstance that caused some merriment. The engineer, Sir I. Brunel, appeared highly gratified at the happy result of his past anxiety and arduous labour. The shield will continue its advance, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... men of political eminence; Lord Wetherwool, a great agriculturist; Viscount Flash, an amateur of the Fancy; Lord Skimcream, an ex-amateur director of a winter theatre; Lord Flute, an amateur director of the Opera, whose family motto, by a lucky coincidence, is 'Opera non Verba.' There were, moreover, Mr. Highsole, a great tragedian, and my friend Tom Sapphic, the dandy poet; one of those bores, the 'Lions' of the season. He had just brought out a new tragedy, called the 'Bedlamite in Buff,' under the auspices of Lord Skimcream; ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... blowing, the sea still dashes with amazing violence against the very same point of land off which Paul and his companions were that night labouring. In the depth of the water at the place there is another most remarkable coincidence. We are told that the sailors "sounded and found it twenty fathoms, and when they had gone a little farther, they sounded, and found it fifteen fathoms." [144:2] "But what," observes a modern writer, "are the soundings ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... specialist of the modern stamp; but he was something better, a born teacher. In spite of an unprepossessing appearance, faulty diction, and a ridiculous Andalusian accent, Lista was able to inspire his students and win their affection. It is no coincidence that four of the fellow students of the Colegio de San Mateo, Espronceda, Felipe Pardo, Ventura de la Vega, and Escosura, afterwards became ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... event! O remarkable circumstance! O extraordinary coincidence, which I am sure none of you could BY ANY POSSIBILITY have divined! When the lions came to Rosalba, instead of devouring her with their great teeth, it was with kisses they gobbled her up! They licked her pretty feet, they nuzzled their noses in her lap, they moo'd, they seemed to say, ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Stoicheion, Element, gets to mean a Daemon—as Megathos, Greatness, means an Angel.[142:2] But behold a mystery! The word Stoicheia, 'elementa', had long been used for the Greek A B C, and in particular for the seven vowels a e e i o u o. That is no chance, no mere coincidence. The vowels are the mystic signs of the Planets; they have control over the planets. Hence strange prayers ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... therefore, was great when we discovered Captain Wedderburn dressed out in the garb of a Junker of the middle ages, and "bonny Girzie Sinclair," the Laird of Roslin's daughter, masquerading as a German Frauelein. The coincidence, if it be not plagiary, is so curious, that we have translated the ballad with a much freer hand than usual, confessing at the same time that the advantage, in point of humour and gallantry, is clearly on the side of the old ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... superstitious man—Ryder's great grandfather, perhaps, would have felt it an omen of warning, and a devout man—Ryder's grandfather, perhaps—would have taken it for a sign from Heaven to divert his steps. Ryder reflected upon coincidence. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... had never seen. Each time that bell sounded, my heart seemed to try to choke me. It had been my grievance, since we had the telephone installed, that we heard nothing of it excepting that we had to make another payment for its use; but now, by a maddening coincidence, everybody that I had ever met took to ringing me up about trifles and agitating ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... to have gone dry, so that the word came harshly. Within the hour the King had used the same phrase, and the coincidence startled him unpleasantly. ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... proceeded with; their chief succeeded in reaching Paris safely, where he hid himself. Two successive arrivals completed the band of conspirators; on January 16th, 1804, General Pichegru, the Marquis de la Riviere, Jules and Armand de Polignac, landed in France. On the same day, and by a coincidence which suggests the idea of a certain knowledge of the situation, the First Consul said in his statement as to the ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... discussion been of any use? 'Yes, stranger; for by a singular coincidence the Cretans are about to send out a colony, of which the settlement has been confided to the Cnosians. Ten commissioners, of whom I am one, are to give laws to the colonists, and we may give any which ...
— Laws • Plato
... the alarm into which she had been thrown by some supposed coincidence of the present accident with the apparition at Baldringham, Eveline, entering into her betrothed husband's humour, was about to raise him from the ground, when she was interrupted by the arrival of a hasty messenger, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... him or from me—made us both start. With a fierce expression he turned towards the bushes at our right, but not before I had seen, by the look of astonishment he had cast upon the flower, that, notwithstanding the coincidence of finding him at the gate, he had had nothing to do ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... Sir Stephen still eyed him with barely concealed anxiety. "Strange coincidence, Stafford! I—I haven't seen Ralph Falconer for—for—ever so many years! And he is thrown at my very gate! And they say there is no such ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... that she had evidently walked so many miles from the scene of the wreck that no attempt was made to identify his father's body. A baby was no novelty in the poorhouse, and no one was greatly interested in establishing a circle of relatives for him, and, except for a happy coincidence, he might have remained in ignorance of his mother's people ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... could not read writing, but he had his father's letter in his pocket, and Mary capered at the delightful coincidence, on finding that Jem Jennings was actually a quarter-master on board the Alcestis. It gave a sort of property in the boy, and she almost grudged Meta the having been first to say that she would pay for the rest of his journey, instead of ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... at home. While Derues, alias Desportes, alias Mme. de Lamotte, was masquerading in Lyons, events had been moving swiftly and unfavourably in Paris. Sick with misgiving and anxiety, M. de Lamotte had come there to find, if possible, his wife and child. By a strange coincidence he alighted at an inn in the Rue de la Mortellerie, only a few yards from the wine-cellar in which the corpse of his ill-fated wife lay buried. He lost no time in putting his case before the Lieutenant of Police, who placed the affair ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... fright or to cruel treatment are handicapped in the very beginning of life's race. Maternal impressions from fright or physical violence undoubtedly are followed by the birth of individuals malformed and in many respects with altered minds. Although some biologists try to deny this, the coincidence is too widely observed to admit of doubt, although the precise manner in which the effect is produced has not been clearly demonstrated. Sufficient is known to make it of the utmost importance that, in the interest of her ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... peculation in which we allow our public servants to indulge with hardly ever an effective word of protest, are alike to be ascribed to the same causes which interfere with our higher culture. It is by no means a mere accidental coincidence that for every dollar stolen by government officials in Prussia, at least fifty or a hundred are stolen in the United States. This does not show that the Germans are our superiors in average honesty, but it ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... mere chance coincidence that this remark of Geordie's came at a moment when it made more easy of introduction to Grace that part of the parable story which she was full of eagerness to tell to her first scholars? She desired ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... into the service of the United States in the war with Spain, thus repeating the proud distinction gained by the state in 1861, when Minnesota was the first state to offer troops for the defense of the Union in the Civil War. It is a curious as well as interesting coincidence, that the First Minnesota Regiment for the Civil War was mustered in on April 29, 1861, and the first three regiments for the Spanish War were mobilized at St. Paul on April ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... these accounts graphic tabulation, and at once many interesting facts are presented to the eye. The Rabbit line prior to 1845 is not reliable. Its subsequent close coincidence with that of Lynx, Marten, Skunk, and Fox is evidently ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the capital locked up in the new church, now so nearly completed, on the spot where they picked up the eagle! How shall it be dedicated to Desmotes in Desmotes' lifetime? Were it not a most blissful and appropriate coincidence if the day of the consecration were that of the saint's migration to a better world? I shall submit this view of the case to my uncle: he is accustomed to hear reason from me, of whom, between ourselves, he is not a little afraid. Thou ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... accused of bearing too close a resemblance to one in a popular Stage Play; if so, the coincidence is purely accidental, as the Dramatist is not in the habit of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... anything so beautiful. All the glories of light ever imagined or described seemed to pulsate in its crystalline chambers. Its weight, as I learned from Simon, was exactly one hundred and forty carats. Here was an amazing coincidence. The hand of destiny seemed in it. On the very evening when the spirit of Leeuwenhoek communicates to me the great secret of the microscope, the priceless means which he directs me to employ start up within my easy reach! I determined, with the most perfect ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... most remarkable part of the story remains to be told. By a strange coincidence the prophetic utterance of Howgill was fulfilled in a striking manner, for all the children of Justice Duckett died without leaving any issue, whilst some of them came to actual poverty, one begging her bread from door to door. Grayrigg Hall passed ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. Her husband's family had been residents there for generations, and bore, indeed, the name of their birthplace—Bretton of Bretton: whether by coincidence, or because some remote ancestor had been a personage of sufficient importance to leave his name to his neighbourhood, I ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... sudden deaths of the two pillars of finance was, to say the least, a curious coincidence. I recollected that Chamartin had been associated with De Gex, and the object of the latter's journey to Madrid had apparently been to interview his dead friend's widow. I also remembered Professor Vega's description of the deadly effect of that secret poison ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... The coincidence—the identity, we might almost say—of the two works is so great, that, while we have been comparing them, we have often been hardly able to distinguish which was which. We rest little on the similiarity ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of Figs. 4 and 5, Pl 11, of Witham's "Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables," and which were drawn from specimens of cannel coal derived likewise from Lancashire, but which are not so highly magnified. There is an interesting fact to note in this coincidence, and that is that this structure, which is so difficult to explain in its details, is not accidental, but a consequence of the nature of the materials that served to produce the coal of this region. In the midst ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... settled from the boiling heat of their affections, nor attempered with time and experience?' [And our Poet, we may remark in passing, seems to have been struck with that same observation; for by a happy coincidence, he appears to have it in his commonplace book too, and he has not only made a note of it, as this one has, but has taken the trouble to translate it into verse. He does, indeed, go a little out of his way in time, to introduce ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... for life. I took it for granted that the spanish proverb of "tell me with whom you are, and I will tell you what you are," was not to be applied in this instance, on account of the company in which the Consular application, by a mere fortuitous coincidence, happened ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... Dunk about the incident, when his roommate came in a little later, and they were discussing the queer coincidence, when ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... be only a coincidence. But Shears was more surprised when the four men stopped as Lupin entered a tobacconist's shop; and still more when they started again as he came out, but separately, each keeping to his own side of the ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... knew who he was—and had been—he determined that whatever other adventurer might set the world aflame, the Modern Skobeleff should not do it if he and his Royal ally on the Higher Plane could prevent it. His coming had been a curious coincidence, possibly a consequence of obscure causes; but, for some reason or other, he felt himself beginning to look with a more favourable eye on Commander Mark Merrill—perhaps because he was the impersonation of uncompromising hostility to everything that ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... were upon this tow. He tugged excitedly at his beard. "Well, by George, what a coincidence!" he exclaimed. He turned to the mate, his bright eyes snapping. "Look, Briggs! Do you know her? By ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... seemed to take fresh courage at the question, and we could see that he was anxious for us to answer in the affirmative. Had we done so, the commissioner would have been staggered with the coincidence, and our dismissal ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... last off-shoot of the luetic heredity. As far as it is now from my thoughts to put down a descent from syphilitic parents as a regular and indispensable etiological determination of the neuropathic constitution, I nevertheless maintain that the coincidence observed by me is not accidental and not ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... in resentment for the ungrateful return to his former services, the incorrigible wickedness of the Queen, and even the blind uxorious confidence of Cymbeline, are all so many lines of the same story, tending to the same point. The effect of this coincidence is rather felt than observed; and as the impression exists unconsciously in the mind of the reader, so it probably arose in the same manner in the mind of the author, not from design, but from ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... moment, else he had been crushed to death; but was reserved to be a grand benefactor afterwards." (Thoresby, ii. 15.) But what will probably strike the reader as more extraordinary even than this coincidence is that Sterne should have been either unaware of it, or should have omitted mention of it ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... discredited the whole affair. As it is, I know not what to make of it. It may have been a dream; nay, it must have been a dream; yet, even as a dream, occurring just at the hour it did, it was certainly an astonishing and a most marvelous coincidence." ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... would and as long as he would, letting his friends think him dead if it pleased him; but a man with a wife could not in his sane senses be supposed to act so. It was a strange thing, his meeting with this woman—a singular coincidence; one that he would hardly have believed, if related to him, as happening ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... century they will probably reappear, but as such a phenomenon demand the coincidence of many future contingencies, I think few who live will ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... you of a strange coincidence: The very year that Nils Holgersson travelled with the wild geese there was a woman who thought of writing a book about Sweden, which would be suitable for children to read in the schools. She had thought of this from Christmas time until the following autumn; ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... in the hands of his publishers as to be an object of pity. A certain "Edward R. Roe" is also an author, and is suffering cruelly in reputation because his publishers so manage that he is identified with me. By strange coincidence, they hit upon a cover for his book which is almost a facsimile of the cover of my pamphlet novel, "An Original Belle," previously issued. The R in the name of this unfortunate man has been furnished with such a diminutive tail ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... science, has imagined himself to have ascertained the constant laws regulating the relation of this popular demand to its supply; or, at least, to have proved that demand and supply were connected by heavenly balance, over which human foresight had no power. I chanced, by singular coincidence, lately to see this theory of the law of demand and supply brought to as sharp practical issue in another great siege, as I had seen the theories of intrinsic value brought, in the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a startling coincidence if Mrs. Ransome and her daughter should return to-day. I fear ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... fought their first battle with the Brigade on this spot in April 1915, and the name of the camp was of course taken from the town where their H.Q. were stationed at home. When he came to say farewell to the battalion, General Riddell referred to this curious coincidence and also bade us remember the regimental motto 'Quo Fata Vocant' (' Whither the Fates call'). So we left the Ypres Salient for the last time. And although I went into Belgium again with the Army of Occupation, I have never set foot ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... until the 18th of January, the day on which, one hundred and seventy years before, the new emperor's ancestor, Frederick I, had placed the Prussian crown on his head at Konigsberg, and thus laid the basis of the growing greatness of his house. It was an ever-memorable coincidence that, in the superb-mirrored hall of the Versailles palace, where since the days of Richelieu so many plans had been concocted for the humiliation of Germany, King William should now proclaim himself German emperor. After the reading of the imperial proclamation to the German ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... cubical box, which lay on a table, without any apparent lid or means of opening it. This I used to take up in my hands, and find very heavy; but the predominance of some intensely black object, which I have never experienced before or since, was too marked to be a mere coincidence; and I have little doubt that it was some obscure symptom of my condition, and had some definite physical cause. Indeed, at the same time, I was occasionally aware of the presence of something black in waking hours, not a thing definitely seen, but existing ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... wearing their feathers, and, above all, the coincidence of both being the reward of merit, induces a belief that in times long gone by a relationship may have existed between the Chinese and the American; a belief that is strengthened by other and more curious testimony ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... thing struck me then, that at this rate it would be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that she was travelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over Withers ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... the fortunate coincidences," replied Average Jones modestly. "They're about half of it. In fact, detective work, for all that is said on the other side, is mostly the ability to recognize and connect coincidences. The coincidence of the escape of the Red Dots from Professor Moseley's breeding cages; the coincidence of the death of the dogs on Golden Hill, followed by the death of the child; the coincidence of poor Moseley's having left the red dot letters on the desk instead of destroying them; the coincidence of ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Though is it not a strange coincidence? My mind had been so flurried that I was glad to get out into the fresh air. When shall I see you again?" He couldn't bring himself to say—never. There would have been a mock-tragic element about the ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... It was a strange coincidence. The ladies of Rome frequently go to the church of the Capuchins, as Corona had done, to seek the aid and counsel of Padre Filippo, but Corona had never met Donna Tullia there. Madame Mayer did not profess to be very devout. As a matter of fact, she had not found it convenient ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... in the practice of this art, I could never attain to sing with any certainty at sight. What rendered the study of music more agreeable to me at that time, was, being able to practise it with Madam de Warrens. In other respects our tastes were widely different: this was a point of coincidence, which I loved to avail myself of. She had no more objection to this than myself. I knew at that time almost as much of it as she did, and after two or three efforts, we could make shift to decipher an air. Sometimes, when I saw her busy at her furnace, I have said, "Here now is ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... name and Christian name are exactly the same. It's an odd coincidence! They, however, changed their name, when they ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... day the streets of Philadelphia were crowded with people anxious to learn the decision. In the steeple of the old State House was a bell on which, by a happy coincidence, was inscribed, "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." In the morning, when Congress assembled, the bell-ringer went to his post, having placed his boy below to announce when the Declaration was adopted, ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... income; indeed she dressed with great economy and gave away whatever was over in presents or charity. Oh, what a comfort it was to Theobald to reflect that he had a wife on whom he could rely never to cost him a sixpence of unauthorised expenditure! Letting alone her absolute submission, the perfect coincidence of her opinion with his own upon every subject and her constant assurances to him that he was right in everything which he took it into his head to say or do, what a tower of strength to him was her exactness in money matters! As years ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... quotations. It is, indeed, true that many of these jewels are fetched from the mines of other poets: great as Milton's obligations, to Nature were, his obligations to books were greater. But he has made all his own by the alchemy of his genius, and borrows little but to improve. The most remarkable coincidence is with a piece certainly unknown to him—Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso," which was first acted in 1637, the year of the publication of "Comus," a great year in the history of the drama, for the "Cid" appeared in it also. The similarity of the situations of Justina tempted by the Demon, and the ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... even strike him as in any way a very remarkable coincidence that almost on the doorstep of his own home he should have lighted upon the very person he needed to give him the particular information he was in want of. For in many ways, in spite of his boasted independence, poor Geoff was as innocent ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... spirit, worthy of a better age. The shields of the riders are oblong; their tilting spears pointless; their conical helmets terminate in a nasal below, like the figures in the Bayeux tapestry. "This coincidence," as has been observed elsewhere[4], "is interesting, as deciding a point of some moment towards establishing the antiquity of that celebrated relic, by setting it beyond a doubt, that such helmets were used anterior to the conquest; for it ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... during the ceremony, experienced a natural reaction, talking cheerfully throughout the long drive. He recounted many anecdotes of Eskew, chuckling over most of them, though filled with wonder by a coincidence which he and Flitcroft had discovered; the Colonel had recently been made the custodian of his old friend's will, and it had been opened the day before the funeral. Eskew had left everything he possessed—with the regret that ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... shot and shells to familiarize the enemy with its range. Our battery now consisted of two twenty-pound Parrott, and two brand-new English Blakeley guns, to one of which I belonged. And a singular coincidence it was that in putting in the first charge my gun was choked, the same thing having occurred on the same field a year before, being the only times it happened during the war. I went immediately to the third piece and took the ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... of all kinds assailed the army, it was remembered that General de Lorencez's violation of the sacredness of a treaty had taken place on Good Friday at half-past three o'clock, and I was told that this coincidence had been looked upon by many among the soldiers ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... uneasy thoughts there detached itself, first and foremost, the discovery that Redgrave had not been in Paris when Mrs. Strangeways said he was. What was the meaning of this contradiction? Thereto hung the singular coincidence of Redgrave's return home exactly at the time when she and Mrs. Strangeways happened to be there. She had thought of it as a coincidence and nothing more; but if Redgrave had deceived Mrs. Strangeways as to his movements, the unlooked-for arrival took a suspicious significance. There remained ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... daughter of that same Bellecour. And at Boisvert this briganding Captain was as much to-night the lord of life and death, and all besides, as had been the Marquis of Bellecour of old. But he pondered not these things, for all that the stern irony of the coincidence did not escape him. That evil look in Charlot's eyes, that sinister smile on Charlot's lips, more than suggested what manner of vengeance the Captain would exact—and that, for the time, was matter enough to absorb the ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... known my opinion concerning the literary acquisitions of our immortal Dramatist; and remember how I congratulated myself on my coincidence with the last and best of his Editors. I told you, however, that his small Latin and less Greek would still be litigated, and you see very assuredly that I was not mistaken. The trumpet hath been sounded against "the darling project of representing Shakespeare as ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... is a pretty busy time with him, getting his stuff out for the fall productions, I have little doubt I shall be able to help you. By Jove!" I added, as I glanced over the cafe, "that's a singular coincidence—there is Markoo himself just ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... addition of the letter n, between the u and the a, became Lunar, meaning "of the Moon!" Yet Lunar was unmistakably a word derived from the language of the Earth! It was possible, of course, that this was mere coincidence; but, taken in connection with the suspicions of Jaska, and the incontrovertible fact that Luar resembled people of the Earth, Sarka did not believe in this particular ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... here today except the strange coincidence. The officials of the Board of Trade have been most exacting in seeing that every compliance has been made with existing regulations. As the matter is to be a 'nine days wonder', they are evidently determined that there shall be no cause ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... relations to foreign affairs, to the revenue and expenditures, and to the military force of the Union by land and sea. A coordinate department of the judiciary has expounded the Constitution and the laws, settling in harmonious coincidence with the legislative will numerous weighty questions of construction which the imperfection of human language had rendered unavoidable. The year of jubilee since the first formation of our Union has just elapsed; that of the declaration of our independence ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... the end of each deed the customary cup of wine was said to have been emptied by both parties to the contract. This cup of wine, in the deeds, was termed, "Ukkon's cup." Ukko, however, is the chief God according to Finnish mythology, and thus the coincidence of the Magyar Ukkon and the Finnish Ukko ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... so easy of execution. It required two days of red tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been the resort hotel of more ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... He remembered that Tregarva had said just the same thing to him that very morning, and the (to him) strange coincidence sank deep into ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... old woman. I feel as if she had been my friend all my life! I feel quite drawn towards her. What a wonderful coincidence that Dr. Goodenough should direct us to this very house! I have written to your father about it. And to think that I should have written to Clive at this very house, and quite forgotten Mrs. Honeyman's name—and such an odd name too. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Grayson. Most eccentric man," he continued. "Danby tells me—now really what a coincidence! Sir James, by all that is singular! Ah, my dear Sir James, I was thinking about you. Ah, Edgar, my ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... said he. "At any rate it is a very favorable coincidence. However, I must have more information than the hurried reports of Burgess and Fuller to be certain. Yes, this ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... sorcerer and of Prelati, both getting dangerously wounded in an empty room, under identical circumstances—I tell you, it's a remarkable coincidence," ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... more plausible theory than any he had constructed to explain an ability to produce real knowledge of the future. Of course, there was that business about the Kilroy. That had been too close on too many points to be dismissed as coincidence. Then, again, Weill's words came back to disquiet him. Had he really gotten that before the event, as he believed, or had he only imagined, ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... house became witnesses of the scene, the report of which spread rapidly through the city. The same morning, upon a warrant from the procureur-general, M. Desalleux was conducted to the criminal prison of Orleans; and it has since been remarked, as a singular coincidence, that his cell was the same that had been occupied by Peter Leroux up to the day ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... By a coincidence; after my return to San Francisco, he came thither, and again became my neighbor at North Beach. I went up to see him one evening. He was very feeble, and it was plain that the end was not far off. At the first glance I saw that a great change had ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... "Master, what a coincidence! Are these newly decorated walls really ancient with memories?" I looked around my simply ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... they were. "And if it is true that her mother's willful silence caused Kilmeny's dumbness, I fear, as you say, that we cannot help her. But you may be mistaken. It may have been nothing more than a strange coincidence. Possibly something may be done for her. At all events, we must try. I have a friend in Queenslea who is a physician. His name is David Baker, and he is a very skilful specialist in regard to the throat and voice. I shall have him come here ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... then in the Mosaic narrative five points which correspond in order and character to five points in the Geological record; and with reference to two, at least, of these points, we cannot imagine any cause for the coincidence in the shape of a fortunate conjecture, because, so far as we can tell, there was nothing apparent on the face of the earth to suggest to the mind of the writer the long past existence of such a state ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... while riding homewards to his family after one of his voyages, and his widow maintained herself in comfort by keeping the old King's Head Inn at Croydon Market-place. Of her two daughters the younger married another Mr. Richardson, a baker at Croydon, so that, by an odd coincidence, there were two families of Richardsons, unconnected with one another except through their relationship to ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... the coincidence of circumstances and wonderful combination of causes which gradually prepared the people of this country for independence; when we contemplate the rise, progress, and termination of the late war, which gave them a name among the nations of the earth, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... It is a curious coincidence that not only were the number, of the opposing armies at the battle of Sharpsburg almost identical with those of the French and Germans at the battle of Worth, but that there is no small resemblance between the natural features and surrounding ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... production of The Feast at Solhoug. It seems doubtful whether this was actually his first meeting with her; but at any rate we can scarcely suppose that he knew her during the previous summer, when he was writing his play. It is a curious coincidence, then, that he should have found in Susanna Thoresen and her sister Marie very much the same contrast of characters which had occupied him in his first dramatic effort, Catilina, and which had formed the main subject of the play ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... struck with this strange coincidence—as it seemed to them; though in fact that they should meet at Blentmouth was not properly a coincidence at all. There was nothing surprising about it; the same cause and similar impulses had brought them both there. The woman who lay dying at Blent and the ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... of how entirely the popularity of the balloon was now reestablished in England, from the mere fact that before the expiration of the year Coxwell had been called upon to make thirty-six voyages. Some of these were from Glasgow, and here a certain coincidence took place which is too curious to be omitted. A descent effected near Milngavie took place in the same field in which Sadler, twenty-nine years before, had also descended, and the same man who caught the rope of Mr. Sadler's balloon ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... disappearing for a few minutes, she presently returned with a pot of porter and a dish of sheep's heads: which gave occasion to several pleasant witticisms on the part of Mr. Sikes, founded upon the singular coincidence of 'jemmies' being a can name, common to them, and also to an ingenious implement much used in his profession. Indeed, the worthy gentleman, stimulated perhaps by the immediate prospect of being on active service, was in great spirits and good humour; in ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... 'what a coincidence! I saw your sister Madge about twenty minutes ago. She seemed very happy about ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... that this was Bunyan's intention. I rather suppose that he refers to the Arminians and other Pelagians, who rely on the coincidence of their actions with the Gospel precepts for their salvation, whatever the ground or root of their conduct may be; who place, in short, the saving virtue in the stream, with little or no reference ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... that," he said, loud enough to be heard by the others. "Those chaps are wearing the Krovitch Lion, too. Coincidence, isn't it?" Involuntary curiosity called all eyes toward the painting. The effect was magical. Astonishment showed in every Krovitch face. They, one and all, uncovered their heads as they recognized in the subject the unconscious ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... given to the public a version of an American legend, which, in a principal feature, bears some likeness to the following transcript of a popular Irish one. It may, however, be interesting to show this very coincidence between the descendants of a Dutch transatlantic colony and the native peasantry of Ireland, in the superstitious annals of both. Our tale, moreover, will be found original in all its circumstances, that ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... verses went into type and then he says he had his first attack of "lead poisoning." After leaving Harvard he studied law for a while and then turned to medicine and surgery, spending two years in study in Paris. It is a singular coincidence and shows his double work in life, that in 1836 when he published his first volume of poems he also took his degree as doctor of medicine. As a physician he was always deeply interested in the problems of heredity and he wrote several novels in ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... senses gave him false intelligence, and that he had really assumed some frightful and revolting shape. It was curious that, partly by his own fault, and largely, no doubt, through the operation of mere coincidence, he was once or twice strongly confirmed in this fantastic delusion. He came one day into a lonely and unfrequented byway, a country lane falling into ruin, but still fringed with elms that had formed an avenue leading to the old manor-house. It was now the road ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... labials, but more so than the Winnebago, which is the most harsh and guttural language in America. The Narcotah sounds to an English ear, like the Chinese, and both in this, and in other respects, the Sioux are thought to present many points of coincidence. It is certain that their manners and customs differ essentially from those of any other tribe, and their physiognomy, as well as their language, and opinions, mark them a distinct race of people. Their sacrifices and their supplications to the unknown God—their ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... was really near to Neapolis, Kena) even more than at Akhmim. Herodotus perhaps confused Coptos with Chemmis. Strabo mentions linen-weaving as an ancient industry of Panopohs, and it is not altogether a coincidence that the cemetery of Akhmim is one of the chief sources of the beautiful textiles of Roman and Coptic age that are brought from Egypt. Monasteries abounded in this neighbourhood from a very early date; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... several huge balloons in its path. It would be a miracle if Combs got through without hitting one of them, even if each balloon was lighted. But he had seen only one light; so had Lieutenant Jackson. That would mean all the rest of the balloons were unlighted—an unbelievable coincidence. ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... treasures were now opening to them. In conclusion, he admitted in their full extent the reasons which had been given by the noble lords for their several resignations, and the statements which they had made in accounting for that remarkable coincidence; but he could not help expressing his surprise that government had been able to go on so long, being conducted, as it now appeared, by ministers who did not think proper to communicate with one another upon the most important question which could ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... his Brother: who had observ'd in a former Letter, that with respect to Temper, what he should otherwise have to speak of NATHANIEL, he had in a great measure said already of ROBERT. Such a coincidence in mild and simple manners, amiable and good disposition, is pleasing to remark any where: and additionally so when it relates to Men who have each original and characteristic Genius; and when the testimony is given by ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... period has itself three stages, in which Fetishism, Polytheism, and Monotheism successively prevail. The chief social characteristics of the Polytheistic period are the institution of slavery and the coincidence or "confusion" of the spiritual and temporal powers. It has two stages: the theocratic, represented by Egypt, and the military, represented by Rome, between which Greece stands in a rather embarrassing ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... the Senator from North Carolina. "The Federalists have the majority, and they are determined to keep the seat of government in the North, as they are determined to have their monarchical will in everything. Madison hopes for some fortuitous coincidence, but I confess I hardly know what ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... more secret manifestations of African folklore and beast worship. He must disclaim the compliment in this instance as, when engaged in inventing the 'People of the Mist,' he was totally ignorant that any of the Bantu tribes reverenced either snake or crocodile divinities. But the coincidence is strange, and once more shows, if further examples of the fact are needed, how impotent are the efforts of imagination to vie with hidden truths—even with the hidden truths of ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... have returned to its rest with entire complacency, and with the firm resolution to trouble this sublunary world no more, had it witnessed the flight of the Austrians through Gitschin. By a "curious coincidence," it happens that a large number of the vanquished were Saxons, descendants, it may be, of men who had acted with Gustavus Adolphus against Wallenstein ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... the Louvre offers a daily denial to those who are so little clear-sighted as to believe in silly nonsense which gratuitously insults our kings and queens. The H or Henri and the two C's of Catherine which back it, appear to represent the two D's of Diane. The coincidence may have pleased Henri II., but it is none the less true that the royal monogram contained officially the initial of the king and that of the queen. This is so true that the monogram can still be seen on the column of the Halle au Ble, which was built ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... selection were better for the race than such natural selection, especially as natural selection cannot operate in our complicated civilisation, where at every turn the poetry of life dashes itself against the dead wall of prose. The miracle has happened. Edwin loves Angelina, and by a strange coincidence Angelina also loves Edwin. But then come the countless questions of income, position, family. Adam and Eve were the only couple that started free from relatives. Else, perhaps, had their garden not been "Paradise." All later lovers have had to ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... dozen correctly. If he chose to take his stand on his general proficiency, he would pass for a fairly clever fellow. But that will by no means satisfy him. He will never admit himself beaten. There is always some trivial accident, some unforeseen coincidence, without which his success would have been certain and recognised; but which, as it happens, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... spider (may the deuce confound him!), not to mention many other presentiments and depressions of spirit, which I am now firmly persuaded proceed from indigestion. I am far from denying the possibility of a coincidence in point of time between a fit of indigestion and a domestic misfortune. I am far from denying the possibility of more remarkable coincidences than that. I have read in books, novels by the very best French authors, how a man, not heard of for twenty years, having, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... cleared; and in a few minutes the glad tidings were carried to every corner of the palace and town of Versailles, and, as speedily as expresses could gallop, to the anxious city of Paris. By a somewhat whimsical coincidence, the Count de Stedingk, who, from having been one of the intended hunting-party, had been admitted into the antechamber, rushing down-stairs in his haste to spread the intelligence, met the Countess de Provence on the staircase. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... interesting coincidence there was living in Norwich at the moment when Borrow was about to leave it, a man who had long identified himself with good causes in Russia, and had lived in that country for a considerable period of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... return to the city. But they were so bright and intelligent that he suspected their visit involved other purposes than the mere selling of papers, and held them until the command was across the river and then permitted them to go. There is an interesting coincidence between this story and the one told to the writer by St. George Tucker, of Richmond, and which appears on ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... in this very contest, 'shame and spitting.' So here there may be included a reference to that time when the hatred of opposition reached its highest point—in the sufferings and death of our Lord. And it is at least a remarkable coincidence that that highest point was reached in formal trials before the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, for the purpose of convicting Him, and that these processes as legal ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... then compared notes. In each case the vision was the same. Then they looked at the writing made by the invisible hand. "Absorpta est mors in Victoria," it ran. "Gentlemen, began Bearwarden, as if addressing a meeting, "this cannot be coincidence; we are undoubtedly and unquestionably in the presence of a spirit or of several spirits. That they understand Latin, we see; and, from what they say, they may have known death. Time may show whether they have been ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... similarity, but of their difference of age; and holding as he did the doctrine of single specific centres, the conclusion was as legitimate as any other; for the two districts must have been occupied by migration from one of the two, or from an intermediate spot, and the chances against exact coincidence of migration and ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... monuments date from the tenth century. No language can give an idea of its first impression. At one end one sees innumerable masses of grey weather-beaten stones in every grotesque angle of incidence and coincidence, but all rude and mean, covered with mystic Hebrew letters and half-buried amid long grass, nettles, and weeds. The place looks exactly as if originally a collection of dunghills or, perhaps, of excavated earth, left to its natural course after the ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... other figures of four, eight, twelve, and twenty sides respectively. It also happened that there were five planets, but no more than five, known to the ancients, namely, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. To Kepler's lively imaginations this coincidence suggested the idea that the five regular solids corresponded to the five planets, and a number of fancied numerical relations were adduced on the subject. The absurdity of this doctrine is obvious enough, especially when we observe that, as is now well ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... point the coincidence between his hopes and those of Fourier, though his are directed by an infinitely higher and deeper knowledge of human nature. But, for our present purpose, it is sufficient to show how surely these different paths have conducted to the same end two earnest thinkers. In some other place I wish ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... By a most curious coincidence, Mr Cripps had only the other day been asked by a particular friend of his, who was removing from the country to London—"where," said Mr Cripps, "there ain't over much use for a rod,"—if he knew ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... whim to give eyebrows to his windows, in the shape of flat arches of alternate red and white bricks, with an extraordinarily grotesque and discomforting effect. But even where the buildings are good separately, the general effect is, unless by coincidence, a ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... did this it was because the F-94 was closing in and it evidently put on speed to pull out ahead far enough to get out of range of the F-94's radar. To say that this motion was random and that it was just a coincidence that the UFO made the 180-degree turn when the F-94 closed in head on and that it was just a coincidence that the UFO speeded up every time the F-94 began to get within radar range is pushing the ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... conceive anything more fortunate than this meeting," Jocelyn Thew declared, as he inspected the cigars which had been brought round to him, with the air of a connoisseur. "Quite an extraordinary coincidence, too, that you should turn up in London on five days' leave, the very day that your sister arrives from the States. Tell me, are you right up at ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... held Tom silent for a moment. That the gentleman whom he had been the means of rescuing, among others, from Earthquake Island, should be met with so unexpectedly, was quite a coincidence, but when it developed that he was bound to the same part of the African continent as were Tom and his friends, and when he said he hoped to rescue some missionaries from the very red pygmies so feared by the old elephant hunter—this was enough ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... belief that they will thus be protected from contagious and other diseases, and in these practices protective fumigation originated. That such different nations should have had the same idea of fixing the purification by fire on St. John's Day is a remarkable coincidence, which perhaps can be accounted for only ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... from my mind was the adjective "incredible." I had to credit it; I had the proof in my vest pocket. The coincidence arising from our topic of conversation didn't bother me too much, either. It was the topic which had drawn him into it. And, as the sandy-haired man had pointed out, we know nothing, one way or another, about these other worlds; we certainly don't know what barriers separate them from our own, ...
— Crossroads of Destiny • Henry Beam Piper
... made express requisition of the naturalists, economists, and historians and sociologists and moralists to provide an imperialistic philosophy for the use of adult and normal dolichocephalous blondes. But there certainly was a coincidence. It may have been due to the influence of what is called a milieu ambiant, that of the commercial and military party. The authors of the doctrine lived in a special atmosphere. Their intellect was there formed—or deformed—their work consisted in gathering ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... despise her calling need not listen to me if I allude to— for I have not time to recount—all her kindness, her cheerfulness, her powers of dispensing comfort, and warmth, and happiness, and promoting the direct and indirect welfare of everyone who came in her path. By what strange coincidence the brothers Foxley had been led to her glowing fireside and her motherly arms brimming over with zeal and kindness for the whole human race, does not matter. It is sufficient that they found her and found ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... most curious coincidence, but Mrs. Henderson arrived last night; Henderson has gone ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... completed. Cowper, in a speech that would be irregular now, but was permissible then, pointed out that the jealousy, dislike, and Jacobite proclivities of the Archfield family had been fully made out, that the coincidence of visits to the castle at that untimely hour had been insufficiently explained, that the condition of the remains in the vault was quite inconsistent with the evidence of the witness, Mistress Woodford, unless there were persons waiting below unknown to her, and that the prisoner ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dreaded that his brother—then in Paris—should learn his intention, and attempt to thwart it; and, somehow or other, the colonel was a little in awe of Ernest, and a little ashamed of his resolution. He did not know that, by a singular coincidence, Ernest himself ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... now was more astonished at her manner than even at the coincidence of the dreams, and he started back from the bed. Whereupon, perceiving the mistake she had made, the horrible witch threw herself down again, and letting her head fall upon the pillow, murmured, "Oh! my head! my head! She must have locked up the moon in the cellar. How will the poor people see ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... near the window, and immediately took it away; still, faithful to the signal, the other disappeared at the same moment, and reappeared at the eleventh heart-beat of the queen. At the same time, by a strange coincidence, a stone passing through the window fell at Mary Seyton's feet. It was, like the first, wrapped in a letter from George: the queen took it from her companion's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... been a good deal over it. This strange man's name was given in the papers as John Braden. Now close to Barthorpe—a mile or two outside it, there's a village of that name—Braden Medworth. That's a curious coincidence—and taken in conjunction with the man's possession of an old book about Barthorpe—why, perhaps there's something in it—possibly more than I thought ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... the drawing. Plate IX. represents the angle of the Ducal Palace, Venice, the same given as the frontispiece in the last issue of THE BROCHURE SERIES. It would hardly be possible to come nearer the same point of view if the coincidence were intentional. In the comparison which this forces upon Mr. Ruskin very naturally suffers, as might be expected, from the fact that his training in drawing was not the most thorough. His proportions are somewhat faulty and the detail is only vaguely suggested, in fact this is more or less true ...
— The Brochure Series Of Architectural Illustration, Vol 1, No. 2. February 1895. - Byzantine-Romanesque Doorways in Southern Italy • Various
... human race by his discoveries. He resolved to call his treatise Didactica Magna, or Omnes omnia docendi Artificium. He found a consolation for his misfortunes in the work of invention, and even saw the hand of Providence in the coincidence of the overthrow of schools, through persecutions and wars, and those ideas of a new method which had been vouchsafed to him, and which he was elaborating. Everything might now be begun anew, and untrammelled by the errors ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... passed this man standing near the door and also remembered seeing the same man in the grill room where he had lunched. The fact that the man was now seated near him in the hotel lobby was more than a coincidence. Marsh's eyes roved about the lobby with apparently careless interest, and not even the man across from him could have guessed that he had noted anything or become more watchful than before. However, he was planning action. If this man was watching him ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
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