or so ago Addison poured such finished contempt on all
superstitions of this kind that it would have been difficult to
believe that men and women of intellect would still be clinging to
them to-day. At the same time, their survival is the most natural
thing in the world. They are bound to survive in a world in which men
live not in faiths and enjoyments, but in hopes and fears. Faith is
the way of religion, and enjoyment is the way of philosophy; but hopes
and fears are the coloured lights that illuminate the exciting way of
superstition. If we are creatures of hopes and fears we have no sun,
and our lights have a trick of appearing and disappearing like
will-o'-the-wisps, leading us a pretty dance whither we know not.
Every step we take we expect to unfold the secret. We find omens in
the direction of straws, in the running of hares, in the flight of
birds. If the girl of hopes and fears wishes to know what colour of a
man she is going to marry, she waits till she hears the cuckoo in
summer, and then examines the sole of her shoe in the expectation of
finding a hair on it which will be the colour of her future husband's
head. I will make a confession of my own. I have never listened
slavishly for the cuckoo, but many years ago I had as foolish a
superstition about farthings. I believed that they were luck-bringers.
At the time I was lodging in the traditional garret in Pimlico, trying
more or less vainly to make a living by writing. Whenever I had sent
off a manuscript I used to go out the same evening to a little shop
where, when they sold a loaf, they always gave you a farthing change
out of your threepence. How cheerily I used to leave the shop with the
loaf under my arm and the farthing in my pocket! That farthing, I
felt, could be trusted to cast a spell on the editor towards whom the
manuscript was flying. It would be as effective as an introduction
from one of the crowned heads of Europe. And even if, a night or two
afterwards, the most loathsome of all visible objects--a returned
manuscript--made the lodging-house look still more sordid than before,
I abated no jot of my trust. My heart sank for the moment, but in the
end I settled down to acceptance of the fact that there was a fool
sitting in an editor's chair who could resist even the power of
farthings. On the next day, or the day after, I would set out with
revived hope for the baker's shop again. I remember the acute misery I
felt on one occasion when I we