OLD MURRAY BAY 



our inveterate favouring of the other turn 

 is an aberration for which we have to seek 

 a cause. Note, parenthetically, that the old 

 puzzle of the English rule of the road for 

 vehicles yields to this explanation — based 

 upon a settled practice likely to antedate 

 by thousands of years the invention of the 

 wheel. (Pedestrians in England are in a 

 transition stage, without uniform habit or 

 rule — unless shepherded.) 



But more than the individual's personal 

 welfare depended upon his making the 

 deiseal and not the withershins turn — still 

 is believed to depend, indeed, for I have 

 seen a man of the dullest and soberest leave 

 a table where the wine was sent about to 

 the right. The course you held in approach- 

 ing man or dwelling announced you as the 

 bearer of good or evil fortune, declared your 

 attitude, intimated good will or tendered 

 affront. The ancient superstition, now 

 blindly lingering in odd by-ways, once 

 dominated conduct as a rigid and reasoned 

 convention. There was no mistaking the 

 signification of the turns. So may it well 

 be that the savages, with these auspicious 

 and inauspicious movements of their staves, 

 were speaking in a universal language com- 

 prehended of the Norsemen, and that the 

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