I once knew a fortune-teller who really believed in the science
that he professed. He had learned, as a student of the old
Chinese philosophy, to believe in divination long before he
thought of practising it. During his youth he had been in the
service of a wealthy daimyo, but subsequently, like thousands of
other samurai, found himself reduced to desperate straits by the
social and political changes of Meiji. It was then that he became
a fortune-teller,--an itinerant uranaiya,--travelling on foot
from town to town, and returning to his home rarely more than
once a year with the proceeds of his journey. As a fortune-teller
he was tolerably successful,--chiefly, I think, because of his
perfect sincerity, and because of a peculiar gentle manner that
invited confidence. His system was the old scholarly one: he used
the book known to English readers as the Yi-King,--also a set of
ebony blocks which could be so arranged as to form any of the
Chinese hexagrams;--and he always began his divination with an
earnest prayer to the gods.

The system itself he held to be infallible in the hands of a
master. He confessed that he had made some erroneous predictions;
but he said that these mistakes had been entirely due to his own
miscomprehension of certain texts or diagrams. To do him justice
I must mention that in my own case--(he told my fortune four
times),--his predictions were fulfilled in such wise that I
became afraid of them. You may disbelieve in fortune-telling,--
intellectually scorn it; but something of inherited superstitious
tendency lurks within most of us; and a few strange experiences
can so appeal to that inheritance as to induce the most
unreasoning hope or fear of the good or bad luck promised you by
some diviner. Really to see our future would be a misery. Imagine