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broke in with this searching remark
Did you never fall in, reader, with a puerile, puttering person, who was always seeking to find coincidences, which when found, and ‘made note of,’ were in reality no coincidences at all? Such an one it was, who happening the other evening to remember, in the midst of an interesting conversation upon the great discoveries of the earth, that a dove was called columba in the Latin, broke in with this searching remark : ‘It’s a very curious coincidence, is n’t it, that the old world was discovered by a Colum-ba, and the new world by a Colum-bus? But when you come to pursue the subject in detail, is n’t it very ex-trod’-nary that the one should come from Noah, and the other from Ge-noa!’ And the old ‘spoon’ looked at the unwilling auditors, into whose conversation he had interpolated this sage suggestion, with mouth half open, and an ‘inquiring eye,’ as if suggesting the surprise which the ‘coincidence’ should awaken.
ex “Editor’s Table,” in The Knickerbocker; Or, New-York Monthly Magazine 33:1 (January 1849) : 84
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