"If you vote for this man," shrieks the cart-tail orator, "rents will be lower and the street cleaner and you will get jobs. The other ticket stands for graft and greed. Vote for it if you want your children to run in the streets, because there is no room for them in the schools."
Predicts Like a Spellbinder.
Like the spellbinder, the oracle frequently builds on the look-on-this-picture-and-then-on-that plan.
"This is a strong line," mumbles the palmist. "You will meet a man with blue eyes who will help you, but beware of a man with dark hair."
Sometimes the helper has light hair and the man to be avoided black eyes. But invariably the good friend of the future is blond and the devil is brunette. No seer would any more think of changing that color scheme than the writer of a melodrama would dare stage a villain who didn't have hair and mustache as black as night. That prediction is one of the traditions of the art, and no future has ever been complete without the dark and the light men or the dark and the light woman, as the case might be.
One of the most famous of fortune tellers, a woman, died suddenly. She had been reading cards in the same house for forty years, and on the day of her funeral her house was crowded with mourners, whose future she had foreseen with so much shrewdness that not one of the 200 or more men and women who filed by the coffin, to view the body had any fault to find with the services she had rendered. On the contrary, they compared notes, each trying to pay the best tribute to the dead by telling the most wonderful story of her predictions.
Warned of the Enemy.
"I was sitting right in this room at that table where the flowers are today," said one mourner, "and she said to me: 'You have an enemy. It is here on this card where you can see it plainly. But here is a friend, a tall, light man, who will come between you and your enemy. Put your trust in the tall, light man, but keep away from a dark man. There is a dark-haired woman who pretends to be your friend, but lies about you.'"
Compare that prediction of the oracle with this forecast of Daniel Defoe's famous deaf and dumb predictor, Duncan Campbell.
"To Mme. S——h W——d; I see but one misfortune after the year of 1725. A black man, pretty tall and fat, seems to wish you no good. Never tell your secrets to any such persons, and their malice cannot hurt you."