CURIOSITIES OF SUPERSTITION. 759 



sacraments, seven gates of the ISTew Zion, and seven golden candle- 

 sticks, correspond to the seven days of the week. Lars Porsenna 

 swears by the nine gods, and Ovid by the nine Muses. All, perhaps, 

 for the negative reason (though oddity may have its positive attrac- 

 tions) that a deliberative junta of even numbers can not get the bene- 

 fit of a casting vote. Gamblers rarely bet on even numbers ; it is one 

 of their corporation maxims, besides which every individual player has 

 a by-law code of his own. The Spaniard Gai*cia, who broke every 

 gambling-hell on the Rhine, operated upon the theory that luck, like 

 history, repeats itself in a certain succession, and kept a list of succes- 

 sive hits, in order to back the same series after the turning up of the 

 first number. Count Esterhazy, whose portentous luck made him the 

 bugbear of the Swiss watering-places, believed in the inspiration of a 

 first attempt, and relied on the instinct of a pointer a"ny novice who 

 in consideration of a percentage woidd consent to locate his stakes. 

 That the tiger-wardens themselves are not above such superstitions 

 seems proved by the fact that the managers of the little Bath Pfeffers 

 once offered him ten thousand francs to dig his gold from a wealthier 

 mine. 



" Fortis Fortuna adjuvat " (" Fortune favors the strong ") was a 

 Latin proverb, and Napoleon, like Suvaroff and Bismarck, asserted that 

 she is always on the side of the big battalions, though, like their fel- 

 low-men, they probably inclined to the private opinion that " lucki- 

 ness " is a special faculty, and that, irrespective of their energy, pru- 

 dence, and perseverance, some people manage to score success after 

 success. In the California bonanza period every camp had its " lucky 

 man," not always the best mineralogist, but a fellow who somehow had 

 a knack of stumbling upon " pay-dirt," and thus became the chosen 

 pioneer of his comrades. It sometimes really seems as if the race 

 were neither to the swift nor the cunning. We have merchants, spec- 

 ulators, and politicians, whom Fortune declines to forsake, in spite of 

 all their blunders Sontags-Jcinder, " Sunday-children," as the Germans 

 call them fellows who have six points ahead in every game and beat 

 the best players. Where others have wasted their time in mining and 

 counter-mining, they take every fort at the first assault, and for no 

 apparent reason, unless good luck begets self-confidence, for pluck is 

 perhaps, after all, the seci'et of every real success. 



The Chinese divide all auspices into yan and yicen, male and fe- 

 male, positive-lucky and negative-unlucky streams of tendency. The 

 sun is a yan, the moon a yuen, luminary ; daylight blesses and vivi- 

 fies ; moonlight blights. For cognate reasons, perhaps, Friday (the 

 day of Friya, dies Veneris) is an unlucky day : among the Romans, 

 as well as among the ancient Saxons, it was' sacred to a female deity. 

 M. Quetelet estimates that the Friday superstition costs the French rail- 

 way companies an average aggregate of five million francs a year, by 

 which sum the expenses of Friday passenger-trains exceed the receipts ! 



