The Force of Statistics
They were sitting on a seat of the car, immediately in front of me. I was consequently able to hear all that they were saying. They were evidently strangers who had dropped into a conversation. They both had the air of men who considered themselves profoundly interesting as minds. It was plain that each laboured under the impression that he was a ripe thinker.
One had just been reading a book which lay in his lap.
"I've been reading some very interesting statistics," he was saying to the other thinker.
"Ah, statistics" said the other; "wonderful things, sir, statistics; very fond of them myself."
"I find, for instance," the first man went on, "that a drop of water is filled with little . . . with little . . . I forget just what you call them . . . little—er—things, every cubic inch containing—er—containing . . . let me see . . . "
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