Cards from early antiquity have been used to tell fortunes. The Queen of Hearts is the heroine, and as about her group the propitious reds, or the gloomy blacks, so may we hope for good or dread bad luck. The Ace of Spades is a bearer of evil tidings; the King of Hearts, at the right of the Queen, is the very Fortunatus himself. And now, who is this goddess so often invoked? Fortuna, courted by all nations, was, in Greek, Tyche, or the goddess of chance. She differed from Destiny or Fate in so far that she worked without law, giving or taking at her own good pleasure, and dispensing joy or sorrow indefinitely; her symbols were those of mutability—a ball, a wheel, a pair of wings, a rudder. The Romans affirmed that, when she entered their city, she threw off her wings and shoes, and determined to live with them for ever; she seems to have thought better of it, however. She was a sister of the Parcæ, or Fates, those three who spin the thread of life, measure it, and cut it off. Fortunatus, he of the inexhaustible purse of gold and the wishing-cap, is too familiar a figure to the readers of fairy tales to be mentioned here.
And yet, although all nations have desired to propitiate Fortuna, her high-priests and interpreters have ever been in disrepute. In Scotland, that land of demonology and witchcraft, of second-sight, of dreamy superstition, fortune-tellers were denounced as vagabonds, and their punishment, by statute, was scourging and burning of the ears. We all know how the knowledge of the “black art” was denounced in Germany; and the witches of Salem, while they were approached at dead of night by a pale magistrate who desired to have his fortune told, were, at his high behest, tortured, pilloried, and hanged the next week, if the fortune was a bad one, or, if being well foretold, was slow of accomplishment. That half-belief which superstitious persons repose in their oracles, shown in the case of the Indian, who breaks or maims his God if he does not respond to his prayer, and in the remarkable story of Louis XI, of France, who used to alternately pray to and abuse his leaden images of saints, is repeated often in the history of fortune-telling.
Mother Redcap, “a very witch,” was resorted to by hundreds of persons in England as a fortune-teller; her image remains on a coin dated 1667. The well-known prophecies of her neighbor, Mother Shipton, have come down to us. Poor Redcap had all the duckings and the batings of the populace. She and her black cat were the favorite horrors of the superstitious inhabitants of Kentish Town, and hundreds of men, women, and children saw the devil come in state to carry her off. But Mother Shipton (who was born at Knaresborough in the reign of Henry VII) became the most popular of British prophets, and, although she was supposed to have sold her soul to the Old Gentleman, she yet died in her bed decently and in order at an extreme old age. So Fortuna is capricious, even in her treatment of her votaries. It is not strange that “Palmistry” should have taken higher ground than mere fortune-telling, and indeed the lines of the hand will seem to map out character, and perhaps destiny, with some accuracy. The books say that the lines running through the palm indicate will or indecision, force or weakness, quickness or slowness; indeed, all which makes character and fate. We are the arbiters of at least a part of our fortune.
The power to tell fortunes by the hand can be learned from any of the French books on palmistry, and there are one or two little English translations. It can be sufficiently curious and varied to amuse the home circle, and so long as it is done for that purpose, fortune-telling can do no harm.
But the moment we rise above the idea that the beans, the tea-grounds, the black cat, the cards, or the lines in the palm, are but blind guides, making the most palpable mistakes, then the tampering with the curtain becomes dangerous, and we had better leave the future alone.
[VII.]
AMUSEMENTS FOR A RAINY DAY.
It may seem an impeachment of the taste of our readers to have lingered so long on the lesser lights of games and fortune-telling as “Home Amusements,” when we have before us the great world of decorative art: æsthetic embroidery, dinner-card designing, china painting, the making of screens, and the thousand and one devices by which the modern family can amuse itself.
The making of screens is an amusement which occupies the whole family most profitably for a rainy day, even if it is to be only the cutting out of pictures from the illustrated newspapers, and the subsequent arrangement of them in curious conjunction on a white cotton or muslin background. The use of screens has dawned upon the American mind within a few years. They are delightful in a dining-room to keep off a draught or to hide a closet-door. They break up a too long room admirably. They are very useful in a bedroom to shut off the washstand and bath; and they are very comforting to the invalid, as a protection to his easy-chair against insidious breezes.