TRIVIAL AND TRAGIC.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLVI, Issue XLVI, 30 May 1914, Page 11

TRIVIAL AND TRAGIC.

Coincidences, as described by Strand readers for the benefit of the May number, are iisually mild and amiable things. When an excursionist remarked upon' catching a train by the aid of "Shank's pony," "Right you are/ returned his companion;" Great Scot! There she is!" Down the road at that moment came a wretched pony harnessed to the cart of "W. Shanks, general dealer, Hull." .A library subscriber had asked for Kip-, ling's "The Light thai Failed." "IV has just gone out," replied the librarian, and at that moment all .the lights in the building appropriately did the same thing. A lady left her; rings in the crevice of a rock while1 sea-bathing, and though she searched with the greatest pains, could not find. them again. Two years, afterwards, sitting with a friend on the same rocks, she told the story. "It was just some such crevice as this I put them in," she said, sadly illustrating the point, "and I do believe I've found them now," she exclaimed, as her fingers came upon the treasures which had lain there securely through many tides. "When a professional tenor was informed by a specialist that he must have his nose-Wie broken and set again to remedy some troublej he went mournfully away to reflect upon anaesthetics and fees. But it dbahced that he went to a cricket match, and there, by the law 6i coincidence, he received the ball upon his nose, and had it quite sufficiently broken free of charge. Slight matters such as these form the chief part of The Strand's collection. More impressive, are the occasions when .tragedy has been' heightened by coincident features ; and of these one contributor sends in a curious list. A groom was kicked io death by. a vicious mare. His employer, after getting rid of the ianimal, took the- dead man's son into his... service as groom. But exactly ,a year later the son was kickedand killed by a foal of the mare which had killed his father. A shunter at a French railway station was killed on the line, through being can gut by the heel of his boot between two rails at the points, just as a. locomotive came .up. "At the enquiry a witness stated that the father of the deceased had met his death in an exactly similar manner on the self-same spot." There, is another example of ah American son, father, and grandfather having come to an end by this strangely liere>ditary accident—not only in identical fashion, but each being trapped in the same switch. And for coincident experience in life and death, there is the case of two friends wha were drowned together in 1906, through the upsetting of a; "float" on. the Grand Canal, in King's County. "These two men had been born oa the same day, thirty-six years earlier, they were baptised in the same water, and they were buried together, after a joint funeral, in the churchyard at, Ranen."