“Like other stars of the day, Miss Neilson expressed a desire to give every member of her company a memento. I was waiting at the green-room door to escort her to the hotel, when she called me into her dressing-room. ’You are so weird and mysterious, and perhaps I may never see you again. Look over those things and choose something for yourself.’ On her dressing-room table she had piled all her wonderful jewels, a fortune of immense value. I remember that her maid, a little deformed woman, stood by me as I hesitated. ’Yes, to bring you luck,’ she replied and there was a faint chuckle in her throat. Rubies, diamonds, emeralds--they dazzled my eyes. I finally reached forward and picked a black pearl. I said, ’I’ll take this.’ Miss Neilson’s face turned white, and she closed her eyes. ’Oh, David, why do you ask for that?’ she cried, and I dropped it as though I had done an evil thing. ’I’m superstitious,’ she confessed. ’My trunk is full of nails, horseshoes, and the luckiest thing of all is that little black pearl. I dislike to refuse you anything, but I know you will understand.’ I hastily selected a small emerald, and with a feeling almost of temerity I left the room. All during the farewell supper that followed she would bring the conversation back to the strangeness of my choice, until I thought she would never cease, and just on my account. ’If I gave up that pearl, I shouldn’t live a month. Some one told me that, and I believe it,’ she said. “When she left on the morrow she made me promise that if I ever visited London I would seek her out, but that was the last I saw of Adelaide Neilson. She had gone no farther than Reno when she wrote me, sending me a little package in which was buried the black pearl. ’I cannot get your voice out of my mind,’ she wrote. Six months afterwards she died in a little French village. She had returned tired and dusty to the inn from a ramble in the leafy lanes of Normandy, and, drinking a glass of ice-cold milk, was suddenly dead in an hour. [She died in less than _one_ month--August 15, 1880, at a châlet, in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, becoming ill while driving.--W. W.] “Of course I had told my family the incident, and one afternoon, while I was out, my mother went to my room, and, for fear of ill-luck pursuing me, destroyed the black pearl. Such incidents have been put into plays and audiences have laughed over the improbability, but here’s an indisputable fact. Charge it to the long arm of coincidence, if you will, but in my own career I have met so many occurrences that are stranger than fiction that I cannot doubt the workings of coincidence any longer.