nt into a more pretentious shop, where
the girl put my loaf in the scales and asked me whether I would prefer
a small roll or a part of a loaf to make up the full threepenceworth
of weight. I would have given my boots, and even my old hat, to be
able to say, "Please, may I have my farthing?" But my courage failed.
There are things one cannot say to a pretty shop-girl. Years
afterwards I happened to be discussing superstitions with a friend,
and I instanced the well-known belief in the luckiness of farthings.
"But farthings aren't supposed to be lucky," said my friend, with a
smile of authority: "they're supposed to be extremely unlucky." It was
as though the world reeled. Here I had been steadily building up ruin
for myself all that time with my miser's hoard of farthings. I felt
like the man in _The Silver King_ who cries: "Turn back, O wheels of
the Universe, and give me back my yesterday!" If only I could get back
some of my yesterdays, I would assuredly buy my bread in that big,
bright shop where the girl gives you full weight for your threepence;
and never would I set foot in that little low shop where a half-blind
old man wraps your loaf in a page of newspaper, and lays in your hand
a dirty farthing that is only the price of your undoing.

It is, perhaps, natural that my experience should have left me rather
unfriendly to superstitions. I cannot believe that the universe, or
even a single planet of it, is ruled by imps of chance which express
themselves in the doings of crows, and in floating tea-leaves and in
the dropping of umbrellas. Better join the church of the Sea-Dyaks of
Borneo, if one can find nothing better to believe in than that. It is
in order to protest against the heathen religion of crows and numbers
and tea-leaves that I sometimes deliberately leap on to a 'bus
numbered thirteen, or walk under a ladder rather than go round it.
Occasionally, I say, for my mood varies. There are days when I feel
like turning a blind eye to 'bus number 13, and when a crow, sitting
and cawing on the roof of the church opposite, gives me the shivers.
It is in vain that I tell myself that the last superstition is the
most irrational of all, because in some places the sight of one crow
is supposed to be lucky, the sight of two unlucky, while in other
places the reverse is the case, and apart from this, the superstition
does not refer to crows at all, but to magpies. Then, again, when I am
arguing against the dislike of s