The courteous Dr. Thompson will let me tell here an odd coincidence, trivial, but having its interest as one of a series.  The Doctor and myself lay in the bed, and a lieutenant, a friend of his, slept on the sofa, At night, I placed my match-box, a Scotch one, of the Macpherson-plaid pattern, which I bought years ago, on the bureau, just where I could put my hand upon it.  I was the last of the three to rise in the morning, and on looking for my pretty match-box, I found it was gone.  This was rather awkward,—­not on account of the loss, but of the unavoidable fact that one of my fellow-lodgers must have taken it.  I must try to find out what it meant.

“By the way, Doctor, have you seen anything of a little plaid-pattern match-box?”

The Doctor put his hand to his pocket, and, to his own huge surprise and my great gratification, pulled out two match-boxes exactly alike, both printed with the Macpherson plaid.  One was his, the other mine, which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop.  In memory of which event, we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes.

This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some supposed cases of plagiarism of which I will mention one where my name figured.  When a little poem called “The Two Streams” was first printed, a writer in the New York “Evening Post” virtually accused the author of it of borrowing the thought from a baccalaureate sermon of President Hopkins of Williamstown, and printed a quotation from that discourse, which, as I thought, a thief or catch-poll might well consider as establishing a fair presumption that it was so borrowed.  I was at the same time wholly unconscious of ever having met with the discourse or the sentence which the verses were most like, nor do I believe I ever had seen or heard either.  Some time after this, happening to meet my eloquent cousin, Wendell Phillips, I mentioned the fact to him, and he told me that he had once used the special image said to be borrowed, in a discourse delivered at Williamstown.  On relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he informed me that he too, had used the image,—­perhaps referring to his poem called “The Twins.”  He thought Tennyson had used it also.  The parting of the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage attributed to “M.  Loisne,” printed in the “Boston Evening Transcript” for October 23, 1859.  Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks of the showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the Atlantic, one to the Pacific.  I found the image running loose in my mind, without a halter.  It suggested itself as an illustration of the will, and I worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell’s School Atlas.—­The spores of a great many ideas are floating about in the atmosphere.  We no more know where all the growths of our mind came from, than where the lichens which eat the names off from the gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them birth.  The two match-boxes were just alike, but neither was a plagiarism.