Note 4 — IV.—PORTENTS OR OMENS, AUGURIES, LUCKY NUMBERS AND DREAMS.

I have already referred to shoes in connection with birth and marriage, but can find no precise analogy to the “shoe omens” in vogue in Europe—such as the ill luck which it is feared will befall the person who puts a left shoe on a right foot and vice versa. Mirrors, however, share in China the superstitious respect paid to their preservation at home. To break a looking-glass is in most parts of Europe deemed a very unlucky accident. “When a looking glass is broken it is an omen that the party to whom it belongs will lose his best friend. Grose tells us that breaking a looking-glass betokens a mortality in the family, commonly the master;”4 and Buonaparte, having once broken the glass over Josephine’s portrait, could not rest till a special courier had informed him of her safety. This belief exists in full force in China. To break a mirror augurs a separation from one’s wife by death, or otherwise, and is only second in ominous portent to breaking an oil jar. And this superstition of a connection existing between the mirror and its owner’s life is evidenced also by its use in cases of sickness to form the head of a sort of figure made of one of the sick man’s coats which, suspended to a bamboo with the end leaves still on it, is carried about in the vicinity of the house in the hope of attracting the departing soul back to its body. Mirrors are also used as charms, under which head their use will be described.