moment that any
possibility could have made me so. If ever there was a man that laughed
at lucky and unlucky days, despised omens, sneered at warnings, and
scorned at predictions, I was he; and yet I have lived to be the most
credulous and the most superstitious of men. It is now fourteen years
and twenty-seven days--I remember the time to an hour--since I sold that
pony to the Prince Ernest von Saxen-hausen, and since that day I never
had luck. So long as I owned him all went well with me. I ought to tell
you that I am the chief of a company of equestrians, and one corps,
known as Klam's Kunst-Reiters, was the most celebrated on the Continent
In three years I made three hundred thousand guilders, and if the devil
had not induced me to sell "Schatzchen"--that was his name--I should be
this day as rich as Heman Rothschild! From the hour he walked out of the
circus our calamities began. I lost my wife by fever at Wiesbaden, the
most perfect high-school horsewoman in Europe; my son, of twenty years
of age, fell, and dislocated his neck; the year after, at Vienna, my
daughter Gretchen was blinded riding through a fiery hoop at Homburg;
and four years later, all the company died of yellow fever at the
Havannah, leaving me utterly beggared and ruined. Now these, you would
say, though great misfortunes, are all in the course of common events.
But what will you say when, on the eve of each of them, Schatzchen
appeared to me in a dream, performing some well-known feat or other, and
bringing down, as he ever did, thunders of applause; and never did he so
appear without a disaster coming after. I struggled hard before I
suffered this notion to influence me. It was years before I even
mentioned it to any one; and I used for a while to make a jest of it in
the circus, saying, "Take care of yourselves tonight, for I saw
Schatzchen." Of course they were not the stuff to be deterred by such
warnings, but they became so at last. That they did, and were so
terrified, so thoroughly terrified, that the day after one of my visions
not a single member of the troupe would venture on a hazardous feat of
any kind; and if we performed at all, it was only some commonplace
exercises, with few risks, and no daring exploits whatever. Worn out
with evil fortune, crushed and almost broken-hearted, I struggled on for
years, secretly determining, if ever I should chance upon him, to buy
back Schatzchen with my last penny in the world. Indeed, there were