“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.” These unbelieving jesters, who so audaciously defied the fatal omen, did not seem to realize that a popular superstition is not to be laughed out of existence in so summary a manner. Equally futile was the attempt to put it to a scientific test, as, if tried by that means, it appears that, of any group of thirteen persons, the chances are about equal that one will die within the year. Therefore, the attempt to break the spell by inviting a greater number of persons could have the effect only of increasing, rather than diminishing, the probability of the event so much dreaded.[18] It has been stated in the newspapers, from which I take it, that there are many hotels in New York which contain no room numbered thirteen. There are other hotels and office buildings wherein the rooms that are so numbered cannot be leased except once in a great while. In large hotels one custom is to letter the first thirteen rooms and call them parlors. Another custom is simply to skip the unpopular number, and call the thirteenth room “No. 14.” A man who had just rented an office which bears the objectionable number, in a down-town building, asserts that though he has no superstitious dread of the number, he finds that others will not transact business with him in that office. I also find it stated as a fact that the new monster passenger steamship _Oceanic_ has no cabin or seat at the table numbered thirteen.