“Why?” I asked.
“There’s a ring around the moon.”
“That always means rain, does it?” I chaffed.
He did not answer direct, but concluded: “I bet it will be raining by tomorrow noon.”
Just as we were leaving town, and before we reached a bridge which spans the Eel River at this place, I detected the odor of burning rubber and called Franklin’s attention to it. At the same time Speed smelt it too, and stopped the car. We got out and made a search. Sure enough, a rubber covering protecting and separating some wires which joined in a box was on fire, and the smoke was making a fine odor. We put it out, but as we did so Franklin observed, “That’s funny.”
“What?” I inquired.
“Why, this,” he replied. “At this place last year, in a rain, this very spot, nearly, we got out because we smelled burning rubber and put out a fire in this same box.”
“That is odd,” I said, and then I began to think of my own experiences in this line and the fact that so often things have repeated themselves in my life, in little and in big, in such a curious way.
Once, as I told Franklin now—the only other time, in fact, that I took an important trip in this way—a certain Englishman whom I had not seen in years burst in upon me with a proposition that I go to England and Europe with him, offering to see that the money for the trip was raised and without my turning a hand in the matter—and quite in the same way, only a week before, Franklin himself had burst in upon me with a similar proposition, which I had accepted. Another time, at the opening of a critical period of my life, I was compelled to undergo an operation in the process of which, under ether, certain characters appeared to me, acting in a particular way and saying various things to me which impressed me greatly at the time; and later, at another critical period when, strangely enough, I was, much against my wishes, undergoing another operation, these same characters appeared to me and said much the same things in the same way.
One of the commonest of my experiences, as I now told Franklin, had been a thing like this. I would be walking along thinking of nothing in particular when some person, male or female, about whom I cared nothing, would appear, stop me, and chat about nothing in particular. Let us say he or she carried a book, or a green parasol, or a yellow stick, and congratulated me upon or complained to me concerning something I had or had not done. As for my part, at that particular moment I might be trying to solve some problem in relation to fiction or finance—a crucial problem. It would be raining or beautifully clear or snowing. A year or two later, under almost exactly the same circumstances, when I would be trying to solve a similar problem, in rain or snow or clear weather, as the case might be, I would meet the same person, dressed almost as before, carrying a book or a cane or green parasol, and we would talk, about nothing in particular, and I would say to myself, after he or she were gone, perhaps: “Why, last year, at just about this place, when I was thinking of just some such problem as this, I met this same person looking about like this.”