Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/263

Rh on; and in parts of the South you will he told that if the soap be stirred backward it will turn to lye. I have been told that wheelwrights, in greasing the wheels of a wagon or carriage, are in the habit of beginning with a certain wheel and going round the whole vehicle in a set way.

In New Harbor, Newfoundland, it is customary, in getting off small boats, especially when gunning or sealing, to take pains to start from east to west, and, when the wind will permit, the same custom is observed in getting large schooners under way. So, too, in the Western Isles, off the coast of Scotland, boats at starting are, or at any rate used to be, rowed in a sunwise course to insure a lucky voyage.

Many persons in our own country are yet careful to have a new house placed exactly with the points of the compass, no matter whether or not by so doing the building is made parallel with the street which it faces. Occasionally one sees a front yard of an awkward three-cornered shape for this reason, though with practical Americans the idea of the necessity of having the house placed with the meridian is now losing ground. However, in older countries the subject of orientation has been much heeded in planning buildings, especially temples and churches. The east has been the auspicious direction, or that to which worshipers faced in many Asiatic countries, in pagan Rome, and in the early though not the earliest centuries of the Christian Church. In the old imperial palace in Kyoto the eastern gate is used for ceremonial purposes; the southern one is a general entrance; on the western sides there are several miscellaneous gates; but the northern gate is never opened save when a funeral passes forth, and under the old régime the same custom prevailed to a certain extent among the nobility. In general, the north is considered by the Japanese an unlucky direction, probably because it is thus that the dead are carried out for interment. In a Masonic lodge the master is stationed at the east end of the room, and if his place be not the geographical east it is so called.

It is a very common saying among card-players that if one's luck is poor he may change it by rising, walking around his chair three times, lifting the chair, and then resuming 'his game. An old love divination that comes from southeastern Ohio was as follows: Go after dark to an unoccupied house and throw a ball of yarn into it through a window; hold the loose end of the yarn in the hand, then pass three times around the empty house, winding the yarn, meantime repeating: "I wind and who holds? I wind and who holds?" Upon coming to the window the third time the questioner of fate will see the apparition of his or her future spouse. Another love divination from Alabama, or "project," as such charms are called in various parts of New England, is on