Suddenly a young man started up, in dress and appearance the very model of a German student—in short frock coat and loose sacklike trousers, long curling hair hanging over his shoulders, pointed beard and mustache, and the scars of one or two sabre cuts on his handsome animated countenance.
"You want a toast, my friends!" cried he. "An excuse to drink, as though drinking needed an excuse when the wine is good. I will give you one, and a right worthy one too. Our noble selves here assembled; all, so many as we are!" And he glanced round the table, counting the number of the guests. "One, two, three, four—thirteen. We are Thirteen. Es lebe die Dreizehn!"
He raised his glass, in which the golden liquor flashed and sparkled, and set it down, drained to the last drop.
"Thirteen!" exclaimed a pale-faced, dark-eyed youth named Raphael, starting from his seat, and in his turn counting the company. "'Tis true. My friends, ill luck will attend us. We are Thirteen, seated at a round table."
There was evidently an unpleasant impression made upon the guests by this announcement. The toast-giver threw a scornful glance around him—
"What!" cried he, "are we believers in such nursery tales and old wives' superstitions? Pshaw! The charm shall soon be broken. Halls! Franz! Winebutt! Thieving innkeeper! Rascally corkdrawer! where are you hidden? Come forth! Appear!"
Thus invoked, there toddled into the room the master of the tavern—a round-bellied, short-legged individual, whose rosy gills and Bacchus-like appearance proved his devotion to the jolly god whose high-priest he was.
"Sit down here!" cried the mad student, forcing him into a chair; "and now, Raphael and gentlemen all, be pleased to shorten your faces again, and drink your wine as if one with a three after it were an unknown combination of numerals."
The conversation now took a direction naturally given to it by what had just occurred, and the origin and causes of the popular prejudice against the number Thirteen were discussed.
"It cannot be denied that there is something mysterious in the connection and combination of numbers," observed a student in philosophy; "and Pythagoras was right enough when he sought the foundation of all human knowledge in the even and uneven. All over the world the idea of something complete and perfect is associated with even numbers, and of something imperfect and defective with uneven ones. The ancients, too, considered even numbers of good omen, and uneven ones as unpropitious."