The £1,000,000 bank-note, and other new storiesTwain, Mark
General
The £1,000,000 bank-note, and other new stories
Twain, Mark
American essays -- 19th century; American fiction -- 19th century; Humorous stories, American
Now see how the world has moved since then. These small experiences
of mine, which were too formidable at that time for admission to a
grave magazine—if the magazine must allow them to appear as
something above and beyond ‘accidents’ and ‘coincidences’—are
trifling and commonplace now, since the flood of light recently cast
upon mental telegraphy by the intelligent labours of the Psychical
Society. But I think they are worth publishing, just to show what
harmless and ordinary matters were considered dangerous and
incredible eight or ten years ago.
As I have said, the bulk of this old manuscript was written in 1878;
a later part was written from time to time, two, three, and four
years afterwards. The ‘Postscript’ I add to-day.
May, ‘78.—Another of those apparently trifling things has happened to me
which puzzle and perplex all men every now and then, keep them thinking
an hour or two, and leave their minds barren of explanation or solution
at last. Here it is—and it looks inconsequential enough, I am obliged to
say. A few days ago I said: ‘It must be that Frank Millet doesn’t know
we are in Germany, or he would have written long before this. I have
been on the point of dropping him a line at least a dozen times during
the past six weeks, but I always decided to wait a day or two longer,
and see if we shouldn’t hear from him. But now I _will_ write.’ And so I
did. I directed the letter to Paris, and thought, ‘_Now_ we shall hear
from him before this letter is fifty miles from Heidelberg—it always
happens so.’
True enough; but _why_ should it? That is the puzzling part of it. We
are always talking about letters ‘crossing’ each other, for that is one
of the very commonest accidents of this life. We call it ‘accident,’ but
perhaps we misname it. We have the instinct a dozen times a year that
the letter we are writing is going to ‘cross’ the other person’s letter;
and if the reader will rack his memory a little he will recall the fact
that this presentiment had strength enough to it to make him cut his
letter down to a decided briefness, because it would be a waste of time
to write a letter which was going to ‘cross,’ and hence be a useless
letter. I think that in my experience this instinct has generally come
to me in cases where I had put off my letter a good while in the hope
that the other person would write.
Yes, as I was saying, I had waited five or six weeks; then I wrote but
three lines, because I felt and seemed to know that a letter from Millet
would cross mine. And so it did. He wrote the same day that I wrote. The
letters crossed each other. His letter went to Berlin, care of the
American minister, who sent it to me. In this letter Millet said he had
been trying for six weeks to stumble upon somebody who knew my German
address, and at last the idea had occurred to him that a letter sent to
the care of the embassy at Berlin might possibly find me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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