The Popular Craze of Palmistry
Palmistry? Well, I'll tell you what I think, and, what's more, what I know about it. There was a palmist woman came fooling around my house some six months ago, and she told the hands of any idiot who was willing to listen to her. No, she did not tell mine. If she had she might have seen something connected with her own destiny which will be fulfilled when next we meet near a river or a decent-sized cliff.
But she told my daughter Sophie's. Oh yes, she did that. She said her line of love was crossed with that of a pale young hero, or some such folly, and--this is in confidence, mind you, for I don't want the whole world gabbling over my affairs--the girl has run off with a piano-tuner, whose family are threatening proceedings. That's the plain fact, and I don't see any good in mincing it.
Then she told my daughter Mary's also. You remember Mary? A level-headed girl enough, and as healthy as a horse till she met that infernal woman. Now her room is like a dispensary--I might have called it an ex-pensary--crowded with every mixture under the sun: and the girl, goes moping round with a face as long as your arm, expecting "some great misfortune," probably a dangerous illness, before the month is out. What's more, there is nothing so certain as that if she goes on the way she's going she'll get it. But it will be entirely due to her own foolishness. She's taken drugs enough to sicken a battalion. So I called her up one day and I, said: "Mary, my dear, what are those medicines for?"
"I'm going to have an illness," she said; "Mrs. Tommins told me so."
"I don't doubt it," said I, "but are you taking them to make yourself ill and prove her truthful, or to avoid being ill and to prove her a liar?"
"I don't know. I'm taking them because I'm going to be ill." And that was all I could get out of her.
Jane is no better, but if anything worse. She firmly believes that she has got to die in three years, that the third of each month is a dangerous day, and that she ought to beware especially of traction-engines and steam-rollers. The consequence is that she does a good deal of "bewaring"--even to the extent of stopping in bed when a road is up in the neighbourhood, which happens on average twice a month for a week at a time. She also spends the 3rd of every month in bed as a matter of course, and the rest of her time she devotes to the poor, that she may not be found wanting when the day comes. She had four mothers' meeting a week, two Bible classes, two penance days on behalf of the Associated Sisters of the Order of Expiation and Universal Attonement, two Reversionary Scapegoat and New Jerusalem Annuity conferences, two anti-materialist discourses in the East-end, and a social slub gathering of the superannuated seamstresses of Bethnal Green. The odds are, if you ask me, that three years will leave a considerable margin for poor Jane. But what can I do? The girl's got the will of an ox though she might have lived till ninety if that woman had let her alone.
From The Pioneer. August 3, 1894. Page 6.