Part 18

“Augustus having b’oversight Put on his left shoe for his right, Had like to have been slain that day, By soldiers mutining for their pay.”

Cutting the finger nails on the Sabbath is a bad omen. There is a set of rhymed rules for the doing of even this trifling act. Apparently, the Chinese know the omen, as they do not cut the nails at all.

Of the harmless dragon-fly or devil’s darning-needle, country girls say that if one flies in your face it will sew up your eyes.

In some localities I have heard it said that if two persons walking together should be parted by a post, a tree, or a person, in their path, something unlucky will surely result--

“Unless they straightway mutter, ‘Bread and butter, bread and butter.’”

Low, the pirate, would not let his crew work on the Sabbath, not so much, we suppose, from conscientious scruples, as for fear it would bring him bad luck. The rest of the Decalogue did not seem to bother him in the least.

After having once started on an errand or a journey, it is unlucky to go back, even if you have forgotten something of importance. All persons afflicted with frequent lapses of memory should govern themselves accordingly. This belief seems clearly grounded upon the dreadful fate of Lot’s wife.

It was always held unlucky to break a piece of crockery, as a second and a third piece shortly will be broken also. This is closely associated with the belief respecting the number three, elsewhere referred to. In New England it is commonly said that if you should break something on Monday, bad luck will follow you all the rest of the week.

To stumble in going upstairs is also unlucky; perhaps to stumble at any other time. Friar Lawrence says, in “Romeo and Juliet,”--

“They stumble that run fast.”

Two persons washing their hands in the same basin or in the same water will quarrel unless the sign of the cross be made in the water.

It is considered unlucky to take off a ring that was the gift of a deceased person, an engagement, or a marriage ring.

The term “hoodoo,” almost unknown in the Northern United States a few years ago, has gradually worked its way into the vernacular, until it is in almost everybody’s mouth. It is, perhaps, most lavishly employed during the base-ball season, as everyone knows who reads the newspapers, to describe something that has cast a spell upon the players, so bringing about defeat. The term is then “hoodooing.” The hoodoo may be anything particularly ugly or repulsive seen on the way to the game--a deformed old woman, a one-legged man, a lame horse, or a blind beggar, for instance. Most players are said to give full credit to the power of the hoodoo to bewitch them. Indeed, the term has been quite widely taken up as the synonym for bad luck, or, rather, the cause of it, even by the business world. If this is not, to all intents, a belief in witchcraft, it certainly comes very close to what passed for witchcraft two hundred years ago.

This vagrant and ill-favored word “hoodoo” is, again, a corruption of the voudoo of the ignorant blacks of the South, with whom, in fact, it stands, as some say, for witchcraft, pure and simple, or, perhaps, the Black Art, as practised in Africa; while others pronounce it to be a religious rite only. More than this, the voudoo also is a mystic order, into whose unholy mysteries the neophyte is inducted with much barbaric ceremony. In the case of a white woman so initiated in Louisiana, this consisted in the elect chanting a weird incantation, while the novitiate, clad only in her shift, danced within a charmed circle formed of beef bones and skeletons, toads’ feet and spiders, with camphor and kerosene oil sprinkled about it. All those present join in the dance to the accompaniment of tom-toms and other rude instruments, until physical exhaustion compels the dancers to stop.

In its main features we find a certain resemblance between the voudoo dance of the ignorant blacks and the ghost dance practised by some of the wild Indians of the West, and by means of which they are wrought up to the highest pitch of frenzy, so preparing the way for an outbreak, such as occurred a few years ago with most lamentable results.

While the sporting fraternity is notoriously addicted to the hoodoo superstition, yet it is by no means confined to them alone. Not long ago a statement went the rounds of the newspapers to the effect that the superstitious wife of a certain well-known millionnaire had refused to go on board of their palatial yacht because one of the crew had been fatally injured by falling down a hatchway. In plain English, the accident had hoodooed the ship.

But the power of the hoodoo would seem not to be limited to human beings, according to this statement, taken from the columns of a reputable newspaper: “A meadow at Biddeford, Maine, is known as the hoodoo lawn, for the reason that rain follows every time it is mowed, before the grass can be cured. It is said that this has occurred for twenty-five consecutive years.”

To break the spell of the hoodoo, it is as essential to have a mascot, over which the malign influence can have no power, as to have an antidote against poisons. Therefore most ball-players carry a mascot with them. Sometimes it is a goat, or a dog, or again a black sheep, that is gravely led thrice around the field before the play begins.

It is not learned whether or not the different kinds of mascot have ever been pitted against each other. Perhaps the effect would be not unlike that described by Cicero in his treatise on divination. He says there that Cato one day met a friend who seemed in a very troubled frame of mind. On being asked what was the matter, the friend replied: “Oh! my friend, I fear everything. This morning when I awoke, I saw, shall I say it? a mouse gnawing my shoe.” “Well,” said Cato, reassuringly, “calm yourself. The prodigy really would become frightful if the shoe had been gnawing the mouse.”

Naval ships often carry a goat, or some other animal, as a mascot, in deference to Jack’s well-known belief in its peculiar efficacy; and in naval parades the goat usually gravely marches in the procession, and comes in for his share of the applause. Simple-minded Jack christens his favorite gun after some favorite prize-fighter. And why not? since the great Nelson, himself, carried a horseshoe nailed to his mast-head, and since even some of our college foot-ball teams bring their mascots upon the field just like other folk.

The war with Spain could hardly fail of bringing to light some notable examples of the superstitions of sailors concerning mascots. The destruction of Admiral Cervera’s fleet, off Santiago de Cuba, by the American fleet, under command of Admiral Sampson, is freshly remembered. One of the destroyed Spanish ships was named the Colon. Twenty-six days after the battle, the tug-boat Right Arm of the Merritt-Chapman Wrecking Company visited the Colon, for the purpose of raising the Spanish cruiser. The only living thing aboard was a black and white cat. For nearly a month it had been the sole crew and commander of the wrecked battle-ship.

The crew of the Right Arm took possession of the cat, adopted it as a mascot and named it Tomas Cervera. But Cervera brought ill luck. When Lieutenant Hobson raised the Maria Teresa the rescued cat was placed aboard her, to be brought to America.

The Maria Teresa never reached these shores, and when the vessel grounded off the Bahamas the cat fell into the hands of the natives. He was rescued the second time, and at last reached America, a passenger on the United States repair ship Vulcan.

It will be admitted that this cat did not belie that article of the popular belief, which ascribes nine lives to his tribe. But poor Tomas Cervera did not long survive the various hardships and perils to which he had been subjected. He gave up the ghost shortly after all these were happily ended.

Speaking of ships and sailors, it is well known to all seafaring folk that the reputation of a ship for being lucky, or unlucky, is all important. And this reputation may begin at the very moment when she leaves the stocks. Should she, unfortunately, stick on the ways, in launching, a bad name is pretty sure to follow her during the remainder of her career, and to be an important factor in her ability to ship a crew. Even the practice of christening a ship with a bottle of wine is neither more nor less than a survival of pagan superstition by which the favor of the gods was invoked.

The superstition regarding thirteen persons at the table also boasts a remarkable vitality. Just when or how it originated is uncertain. It has been surmised, however, that the Paschal Supper was the beginning of this notion, for there were thirteen persons present then, and what followed is not likely to be forgotten. It has, perhaps, been the subject of greater ridicule than any other popular delusion, probably from the fact of its touching convivial man in his most tender part,--to wit, the stomach. In London some of the literary and other lights even went to the trouble of forming a Thirteen Club for the avowed purpose of breaking down the senseless notion that if thirteen persons were to sit down to dinner together, one of them would die within a twelvemonth. The motto of this club should have been, “All men must die, therefore all men should dine.” If the club’s proceedings showed no lack of invention and mother wit, we still should very much doubt their efficacy toward achieving the avowed end and aim of the club’s existence, for surely such extravagances could have no other effect than to raise a laugh. We reproduce an account of the affair for the reader’s amusement:--

“At the dinner of the club, above mentioned, there were thirteen tables, a similar number of guests being seated at each table. The serving of the meal was announced by the “shivering” of a mirror placed on an easel, a ceremony performed by two cross-eyed waiters! Having put on green neckties and placed a miniature skeleton in their button-holes, the guests passed under a ladder into the dining room. The tables were lighted with small lamps placed on plaster skulls; skeletons were suspended from the candles, which were thirteen in number on each table; the knives were crossed; the salt-stands were in the shape of coffins, with headstones bearing the inscription, ‘In memory of many senseless superstitions, killed by the London Thirteen Club, 1894.’ The salt-spoons were shaped like a grave-digger’s spade.

“After the dinner was fairly started, the chairman asked the company to spill salt with him, and later on he invited them to break looking-glasses with him, all of which having been done, he presented the chairmen of the different tables with a knife each, on condition that nothing was given for them in return. An undertaker, clothed in a variety costume, which would have done credit to a first-class music hall, was then introduced ‘to take orders,’ but he was quickly shuffled out of the room.”