“I questioned him, and he frankly declared that he was ‘dead broke’ and in trouble. He had tried New York in the hope of mending matters, but had decided that his best chance was to go West again. I offered to help him, but he would not borrow more than a trifle, which he needed toward his fare to Chicago. While he talked I noticed that he wore a small but very brilliant opal in his scarf-pin, and half-laughingly I asked him if he ever expected to have any luck while he wore that. It was not an expensive stone, but it was a very pretty one. He looked at me, half surprised, for a moment, and then he took the pin out and looked at it thoughtfully for several moments before speaking. At length he said: “‘I don’t know that I ever had any superstition. In fact, I don’t know that I have now, but it is certainly curious. I bought that stone about two years ago, and everything I have done in a business way since then has resulted in a loss. I have lost some thousands more than I had, and have still to pay the debts. I think I’ll throw it away. The setting is worth the price of a dinner, I guess, so I’ll keep that.’ And he pried the jewel out with his pen-knife and tossed it into the gutter. “I met him again last week, and he returned the loan, taking the bills off a roll that it would do you good to look at. He told me that his luck had changed the day he threw the stone away, for he received a letter that afternoon which put him on the track of a contract by which he made twenty thousand within a year, and that since then everything had prospered as it always had before he bought the opal. “I don’t feel called on to say what I think about it, but those are the facts, and, to say the least, they are curious.” Storms’s Straight Flush _IT CAME NEAR COSTING HIS LIFE AND ANOTHER’S_ “I am not one who is disposed to quarrel with the inevitable,” said the gray-haired young-looking man as he lighted his pipe in the club smoking-room. There had been considerable discussion in the club as to the propriety of allowing pipes, but he had taken no part in it. He had simply kept on smoking his pipe till the others had settled the question, and when it was settled he continued to have nothing whatever to say. “I don’t quarrel with the inevitable,” he remarked, “and I realize that changes of all sorts are among the things that are inevitable. Modern progress cannot be stayed, and modern improvements cannot be ignored. We have new business methods, new political doctrines, new translations of the Bible, and even the new woman, and there does not seem to be any possibility of ignoring them, or even getting away from them. I therefore make no objection to change of any sort, further than to cling to the old order of things myself, as far as I can. Aside from that I am strongly in favor of new-fangled ways--for those that like them. Indeed, I always think of what President Lincoln said: ‘For people that like that sort of----’”