Note 1 — IV.—PORTENTS OR OMENS, AUGURIES, LUCKY NUMBERS AND DREAMS.
Reading edition
the Chinese consider the solitary visitor an omen of good luck. A duck quacking as one passes is, they hold, just the contrary. Regarding dogs the agreement of English belief with that of China is singular. For a strange dog to follow a person is regarded in most parts of our own rural districts as lucky. The Chinese say that if a strange dog comes and remains with one, it is an omen of good to his family and indicates that he will become more wealthy.1 Cats, on the other hand, are inauspicious beasts, and a display of sudden attachment, such as that just noted, foreshadows poverty and distress. “May kittens should be drowned,” according to English folk-lore; but I am not aware that the full-grown animal is deemed particularly objectionable except by sailors, who aver that when a cat becomes unusually frolicsome it portends a storm. Hens also come in for a share of the feeling expressed in the distich