I ought to have given a hint above of his connection and mine with the society of “People who Think we are Going to Know More about Some Things By and By.” This society was really formed by my mother, who for some time, I think, was the only member. But one day Doctor Holmes and I met in the “Old Corner Bookstore,” when the Corner had been moved to the corner of Hamilton Place, and he was telling me one of the extraordinary 109 coincidences which he collects with such zeal. I ventured to trump his story with another; and, in the language of the ungodly, I thought I went one better than he. This led to a talk about coincidences, and I said that my mother had long since said that she meant to have a society of the people who believed that sometime we should know more about such curious coincidences. Doctor Holmes was delighted with the idea, and we “organized” the society then and there; he was to be president, I was to be secretary, and my mother was to be treasurer. There were to be no other members, no entrance fees, no constitution, and no assessments. We seldom meet now that we do not authorize a meeting of this society and challenge each other to produce the remarkable coincidences which have passed since we met before.
There is an awful story of his about the last time a glove was thrown down in an English court-room. It is a story in which Holmes is all mixed up with a marvellous series of impossibilities, such as would make Mr. Clemens’s hair grow gray, and add a new chapter to his studies of telepathy. I will not enter on it now, with the detail of the book that fell from the ninth shelf of a book-case, and opened at the exact passage where the challenge story was to be described. No, I will not tell another word of it; for if I am started upon it, it will take up the whole of this number of Mr. McClure’s Magazine. But sometime, when Mr. McClure wants to make the whole magazine thrill with excitement, he will write to Doctor Holmes, and ask him for that story of the “challenge of battle.”
O. W. HOLMES IN HIS FAVORITE SEAT AT BEVERLY.
As for the story of his hearing Doctor Phinney at Rome, and the other story of Mr. Emerson’s hearing Doctor Phinney at Rome, I never tell that excepting to confidential friends who know that I cannot tell a lie. For if I tell it to any one else, he looks at me with a quizzical air, as much as to say, “This is as bad as the story of the ‘Man Without a Country;’ and I do not know how much to believe, and how much to disbelieve.”
Also called the Peter Butler house. Sewall in his diary speaks of it as Mr. Quincy’s new house (1680-85). There Dorothy was born and married.