So we had not been sure in any case about leaving Little Yeogh Wough at home; and when he pleaded to go with us on board the Peninsular and Oriental liner that was to take us and certain others on her maiden trip in the Baltic, we gave way far more easily than he might have expected.
"Would you have been very miserable if we had said No to you, Roland?" I asked him.
"No. I should have been sorry, but I should have remembered that text that you're always saying."
"Text?" I lifted my eyes in surprise.
"Yes. You know, that one: 'Blessed are they that expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.'"
"That's not a text. It ought to be, but it isn't. But it's a very good motto to steer through life by. The thing to do is always to expect nothing, but to try for everything."
And so it came about that on a certain Friday morning in August the brave little feet of the boy of my heart walked for the first time on the deck of a big ship.
I am superstitious—nearly as superstitious as Napoleon was. Little Yeogh Wough has always known this well, for all through his life, from two years old, he has been careful never to bring any hawthorn, ivy, or peacock's feathers into the house, and has always made the flower-women selling snowdrops strip the ivy from the bunches he had bought for me. I will not sing before breakfast, and I will not have three candles burning in the room, and I would not, under any pressure, have a new house built for me or even have an old house considerably altered. For this I know is true, whatever else in superstition may be nonsense—that whoever builds a new home for himself and takes a pride in it, shall have something terrible happen to him which will prevent him from enjoying his life in that home, even if he should ever get so far as to live in it. For, even in the days when I had not been stricken to the earth and did not believe in the Bible, I had always believed in the truth of the words:
"Fools build houses and wise men live in them."