It is mathematically certain that some people will have an astonishing succession of fortunate experiences which they have nowise aided in bringing about, ripe plums dropping into their mouths from invisible trees. They are popularly called “lucky fellows.” But the ancient Greeks, with that wonderful acumen in practical affairs which was their own, considered them peculiarly dangerous associates, to be avoided as partners in regular business, scarcely safe to associate with as companions. When Polycrates, King of Samos, was crowned with such repeated successes that it seemed as if the very gods might envy him, his friend, the King of Egypt, advised him to throw his most precious jewel, a wonderfully carved signet-ring, into the sea; and when this was brought back the next day by a fisherman, who had found it in the belly of a fish that had swallowed it, the King of Egypt withdrew his fleet and severed his treaty; for he knew some dreadful disaster awaited such unheard-of fortune; and it soon came when Polycrates fell into the hands of his enemy, and was crucified alive on the Asian strand. The story is probably a fable; but its moral is an eternal truth. The hour of prosperity is ever dangerous; but when the prosperity has come without labor or effort or forethought, it is nearly always fatal. Unexpected success enervates the will and fosters illusions of the mind. The ancients represented the goddess Fortuna as proffering a cup of intoxicating wine to her favorites. Either they recognize their success as the result of pure chance, and persuade themselves that they are fortune’s favorite children, and can safely hazard any risks; or their vanity leads them to attribute what was the result of chance to their own miraculous sagacity, and they thus magnify to a dangerous degree their own capacities. Either conclusion leads them surely on the downward road to ruin. Nowhere is this mental debility which seizes the believers in luck more absurdly shown than in the return to primeval superstition which it brings with it. The gambler, in his faith in caprice and chance, sinks to the level of the primitive savage, and accepts the superstitions of that level with equal readiness. The most cultivated habitué of Monte Carlo has his fetishes; he watches for signs and omens; he is as much the slave of auspicious or inauspicious auguries as an Australian cannibal. Pitiable retrogression of the human intellect! What absurdity will he not commit to “break the run of the luck” when it is against him! He will turn his chair thrice around; he will avoid playing if a red-whiskered man opposite him stakes; he will go to his hotel and change his coat. He knows that every principle of right reason and sound logic teaches that events cannot be modified by actions in no way relating to them, but he quietly renounces reason and logic as his guides!