The Mystery of Luck: Is Three a Lucky Number.

Otago Witness, Issue 2369, 27 July 1899, Page 63

The Mystery of Luck : Is Three a Lucky Number.

Mr W. L. Alden writes very funnily in the June number of Pearson's Magazine on the mystery of luck. He argues that three is a lucky number. " If you are a persistent card*player," says Mr Alden, "afc no matter what game, you will find that, as a rule, luck will be with you three consecutive nights, and against you the following three nights. Of course, no one can explain why luck thus runs three nights at a time, but the fact remains. Every now and then you read of a man who has >iad three consecutive wives, but you scarcely ever hear of a man who has had four. By the time the man has become a widower for the third time his ill-luck turns, and he is never again compelled to marry. "-I knew ,a - man who, in the course 'of a single winter, fell over three different" coal scuttles while searching for matches in the middle of the night. He then banished coal "scuttles from his house, and heated it with eteam. He never again fell o «rer a coal scuttle, and thus added ' another to the thousands of instances of the connection between ill-luck and the number three. "Why it should be unlucky to drive with a white horse, or to pass under a ladder, or to break a mirror, or to epill salt, are mysteries, but to deny that these things are unlucky is reckless folly. I knew a man in California who drove a white horse the very first day he came into possession of it, and on the following day he was hanged by a vigilance committee for horse-stealing. Had he driven a black or a bay horse, the chances are that he would have escaped. Why- certain things should be lucky is as mysterious as is 'the unluckiness of other things. Nothing can be more lucky than for a black cat to come to your door, and insist upon taking up his abode with you. This happened to me three years ago last Christmas, and I have not the slightest doubt that good luck will still come to me, though it has bo far been delayed."