great degree, became in their eyes seven twice over...

And since we are speaking of numbers, we cannot fail to notice that they play an important part in our beliefs. The number five, for instance, wards off ill fortune and shames the evil eye: if a lady fears another's envy, or hears that she envies her, she hastens to say "five in her eye," or "five and a little five in the eye of whoever does not bless the Prophet." Is this because the figure five is written as a closed ring which the envier's eye cannot pierce? A woman may be asked her child's age, and if it is five months or five years she answers: "His age is the number of the fingers of your hand." Indeed, how many children have we seen with a piece of silver or gold wrought in the shape of the hand and its fingers hung upon their heads — either stuck with a bit of wax to the child's front locks, or sewn onto his cap! Does this mean that the open palm drives off the envier's eye and blocks the evil from issuing out of it, just as touching wood, among the Franks, prevents the electricity of the envier's eye from reaching the envied?

And the number 13 has its well-known ill repute — a belief that came to us from the West, and its origin is most probably religious: Christ and his disciples were thirteen persons, and the whole company was good and righteous except the thirteenth person, who betrayed and brought ill fortune upon the whole company... Hence every thirteenth person in any company may become an ill omen upon it; hence let people shun the number 13 and the figure 13, and let them tell their tales, truthful or exagger-ated, of an evil power lurking in the number, and let them fit every coincidence that has happened to it and ascribe it to it. But perhaps we should not forget that many have defied the unlucky number, insist-ing that the rooms of their man-sions be 13, and the number of their servants 13, and the number of a man's office room 13 — and no harm befell them. And over how many people's houses has a crow croaked, or an owl hooted at evening, without being able to bring them any harm; indeed, how many people have hung up a horseshoe, and horseshoes, without gaining any happiness.

Optimism and pessimism are two

beliefs whose truth has never been established. The world of the unseen and what it hides has not yet been disclosed to us, nor has it been confirmed to us that birds or animals or plants have any connection with the Director of the Universe — knowing what good or ill He intends for us, and signaling those intentions to us out of the corner of an eye. It is no good, then, to cling to illusions; but if there is no help for it, then let the ban be a ban and not a parting, and the crow a return from exile, just as the doves were "our meeting decreed."

Yes — it is not good for a person to look at the world with an anx-ious, pessimistic eye. Pessimism, and the awaiting of calamities that may never happen, is a misery one creates for oneself, by oneself. Three-quarters of our misfortunes are imaginary misfortunes: we dream, asleep or awake, and take alarm; then we form for ourselves the notion that the calamity is

coming beyond all doubt; then we set ourselves to await its coming, between dread and trembling — and most often it does not happen, and we shall have reaped nothing except to have been distressed in advance, to have made ourselves wretched without cause, and to have spent a few days of our lives in a misery that wore out our strength and shattered our nerves. Had we taken the hopeful view instead of the gloomy one, we should have been happy — or at least have gained a stretch of time in which we did not grieve beforehand, and did not suffer before suffering came.

Why, one wonders, do some of us always wear the dark spectacles? And why do some of us see faint breaths misting the mirror of the self, yet do not hasten to wipe it with a white cloth — rather it seems to them a thick fog, and they fall to sighing and moaning before it until the breaths thicken, and it becomes a fog in earnest.

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