Such confession may come grotesquely enough from one of education and substance, yet all the day long I’ve been thinking on omens and on prophecies. It was my servant who brought it about. He, poor wretch! appeared in my chamber this morning with brows of terror and eyes of gloom. He had consulted a gypsy sorceress, whom the storm drove to cover in this tavern, and crossed the palm of her greed with a silver dollar to be told that he would die within the year. Information hardly worth the fee, truly! And the worst is, the shrinking fool believes the forebode and is already set about mending his lean estates for the change. What is still more strange, I, too, regard the word of this snow-blown witch--whoever the hag may be--and can no more eject her prophecies from my head than can the scared victim of them. This business of superstition--a weakness for the supernatural--belongs with our bone and blood. Reason is no shield from its assaults. Look at Sir Thomas More; chopped on Tower Hill because he would believe that the blessed wafers became of the Savior’s actual flesh and blood! And yet, Sir Thomas wrote that most thoughtful of works, “Utopia,” and was cunning enough of a hard-headed politics to succeed Wolsey as Chancellor. Doubtless my bent to be superstitious came to me from my father. He was a miner; worked and lived on Tom’s Run; and being from Wales, and spending his days in gloomy caverns of coal, held to those fantastic beliefs of his craft in elves and gnomes and brownies and other malignant, small folk of Demonland. However, it becomes not me to find fault with my ancestor nor speak lightly of his foibles. He was a most excellent parent; and it is one of my comforts, and one which neither my money nor my ease could bring, that I was ever a good son. As I say, my father was a miner of coal. Each morning while the mines were open, lamp in hat, he repaired deep within the tunneled belly of the hill across from our cottage and with pick and blast delved the day long. This mine was what is called a “rail mine,” and closed down its work each autumn to resume again in the spring. These beginnings and endings of mine activities depended on the opening and closing of navigation along the Great Lakes. When the lakes were open, the mines were open; when November’s ice locked up the lakes, it locked up the mines as well, and my father and his fellows of the lamp were perforce idle until the warmth of returning spring again freed the keels and south breezes refilled the sails of commerce. As this gave my father but five to six months work a year; and as--at sixty cents a ton and pay for powder, oil, fuse and blacksmithing--he could make no more than forty dollars a month, we were poor enough.