lesson 36

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  We are less credulous than we used to be
In the nineteenth century, a novelist
would bring his story to a conclusion by
presenting his readers with a series of
coincidences --most of them wildly im-
probable. Readers happily accepted the
fact that an obscure maid-servant was
really the hero's mother. A long-lost
brother, who was presumed dead, was
really alive all the time and wickedly
plotting to bring about the hero's down-
fall. And so on. Modern readers would
find such naive solutions totally unaccept-
able. Yet, in real life,circumstances do
sometimes conspire to bring about coin-
cidences which anyone but a nineteenth
century novelist would find incredible.
A German taxi-driver, Franz Bussman, recently found a brother who was
thought to have been killed twenty years before. While on a walking tour with
his wife, he stopped to talk to a workman. After they had gone on,Mrs Bussman
commented on the workman's close resemblance to her husband and even
suggested that he might be his brother. Franz poured scorn on the idea, pointing
out that his brother had been killed in action during the war. Though Mrs
Bussman was fully acquainted with this story, she thought that there was a
chance in a million that she might be right. A few days later, she sent a boy to
the workman to ask him if his name was Hans Bussman, Needless to say, the
man's name was Hans Bussman and he really was Franz's long-lost brother.
When the brothers were re-united, Hans explained how it was that he was still
alive. After having been wounded towards the end of the war, he had been sent
to hospital and was separated from his unit. The hospital had been bombed and
Hans had made his way back into Western Germany on foot. Meanwhile, his
unit was lost and all records of him had been destroyed. Hans returned to his
family home, but the house had been bombed and no one in the neighbourhood
knew what had become of the inhabitants. Assuming that his family had been
killed during an air-raid, Hans settled down in a Village fifty miles away where
he had remained ever since.