Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/127

 MENTAL TELEGRAPHY

times during the past six weeks, but I always de cided to wait a day or two longer, and see if we shouldn t hear from him. But now I will write.&quot; And so I did. I directed the letter to Paris, and thought, &quot;Now we shall hear from him before this letter is fifty miles from Heidelberg it always happens so.&quot;

True enough; but why should it? That is the puzzling part of it. We are always talking about letters crossing&quot; each other, for that is one of the very commonest accidents of this life. We call it &quot;accident,&quot; but perhaps we misname it. We have the instinct a dozen times a year that the letter we are writing is going to &quot;cross&quot; 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 &quot;cross,&quot; 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

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