I am superstitious--nearly as superstitious as Napoleon was. Little Yeogh Wough has always known this well, for all through his life, from two years old, he has been careful never to bring any hawthorn, ivy, or peacock's feathers into the house, and has always made the flower-women selling snowdrops strip the ivy from the bunches he had bought for me. I will not sing before breakfast, and I will not have three candles burning in the room, and I would not, under any pressure, have a new house built for me or even have an old house considerably altered. For this I know is true, whatever else in superstition may be nonsense--that whoever builds a new home for himself and takes a pride in it, shall have something terrible happen to him which will prevent him from enjoying his life in that home, even if he should ever get so far as to live in it. For, even in the days when I had not been stricken to the earth and did not believe in the Bible, I had always believed in the truth of the words: "Fools build houses and wise men live in them." One only has to read about the lives of the great millionaires to have proof that this is so. But I am quite open-minded about Fridays. If anything, I think Friday is a luckier day for me than any other day. I also have a fixed conviction that neither I, nor any of those nearest to me, is born to die by the quite easy and pleasant method of drowning. So we started on a Friday without a qualm. And I did not dream that, even as he ran about this deck and began to live this new life, he was starting on another stage of his training for a soldier! "What a lot of portraits of the Kaiser we've seen!" he said to me one day, when his feet had covered most of the cubic space of Amsterdam, Christiania, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. I laughed. "We really have seen a good many, haven't we? But you don't mind that, do you? I thought you rather liked his personal appearance." "Well, he did look very fine at the funeral of Queen Victoria. I always remember that. But I don't see why he should be all over the place in these countries that don't belong to him." In a palace in Stockholm his inevitable picture occupied an especially conspicuous position on the wall of a certain room. At the same time, the arrangement of the furniture of that room struck us as quite surprisingly ugly and unsuitable. "What a pity to have the piano where it is!" I remarked to our guide. "It would be so much better over at the other side of the room." "It used to be over at the other side, but the Kaiser came here on a visit a little while ago and had it moved. He's had nearly all the furniture in the room altered." Little Yeogh Wough opened his brown eyes very wide. "You wouldn't expect a man like him to take such an interest in little things," he said. "It's only by taking an interest in little things that you can get big ones to come right," I told him. "Remember what I told you about Kitchener and the rails for the new line in the Soudan."