IX. OF EVIL OMENS 144 X. OF HAUNTED HOUSES, PERSONS, AND PLACES 182 XI. OF PRESENTIMENTS 208 XII. THE DIVINING-ROD 229 XIII. WONDERS OF THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE 234 XIV. “SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT” 244 XV. FORTUNE-TELLING, ASTROLOGY, AND PALMISTRY 259 [Illustration] I A RECKONING WITH TIME “Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.” To say that superstition is one of the facts of history is only to state a truism. If that were all, we might treat the subject from a purely philosophical or historical point of view, as one of the inexplicable phenomena of an age much lower in intelligence than our own, and there leave it. But if, also, we must admit superstition to be a present, a living, fact, influencing, if not controlling, the everyday acts of men, we have to deal with a problem as yet unsolved, if not insolvable. I know it is commonly said that such things belong to a past age--that they were the legitimate product of ignorance, and have died out with the education of the masses. In other words, we know more than our ancestors did about the phenomena of nature, and therefore by no means accept, as they did--good, superstitious souls!--the appearance of a comet blazing in the heavens, or the heaving of an earthquake under our feet, as events having moral significance. With the aid of electricity or steam we perform miracles every day of our lives, such as, no doubt, would have created equal wonder and fear for the general stability of the world not many generations ago. Very true. So far as merely physical phenomena are concerned, most of us may have schooled ourselves to disunite them wholly from coming events; but as regards those things which spring from the inward consciousness of the man himself, his intuitions, his perceptions, his aspirations, his imaginative nature, which, if strong enough, is capable of creating and peopling a realm wholly outside of the little world he lives in--“ay, there’s the rub.” Who will undertake to span the gulf stretching out a shoreless void between the revelations of science and the incomprehensible mysteries of life itself? It is upon that debatable ground that superstition finds its strongest foothold, and, like the ivy clinging round old walls, defies every attempt to uproot it. As Hamlet so cogently puts it,-- “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Superstition, we know, is much older than recorded history, and we now stand on the threshold of the twentieth century; yet just in proportion as humanity has passed over this enormous space of time, hand in hand with progress, superstition has followed it like its shadow. That shadow has not yet passed away.