Читать книгу Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New - Nye Bill - Страница 15

Table of Contents

How His Past Was Raked Up and His Future Predicted—Interesting Information for One Dollar—He is Warned to Beware of Certain Bad Men—A Delicate Point of Etiquette—Are Astrologists Deteriorating?

Ring the bell and the door will open," is the remark made by a small label over a bell handle in Third avenue, near Eighteenth street, where Mme. La Foy reads the past, present and future at so much per read. Love, marriage, divorce, business, speculation and sickness are there handled with the utmost impunity by "Mme. La Foy, the famous scientific astrologist," who has monkeyed with the planets for twenty years, and if she wanted any information has "read it in the stars." I rang the bell the other day to see if the door would open. It did so after considerable delay, and a pimply boy in knee pants showed me upstairs into the waiting room. After a while I was removed to the consultation room, where Mme. La Foy, seated behind a small oilcloth-covered table, rakes up old personalities and pries into the future at cut rates.

Skirmishing about among the planets for twenty years involves a great deal of fatigue and exposure, to say nothing of the night work, and so Mme. La Foy has the air of one who has put in a very busy life. She is as familiar with planets, though, as you or I might be with our own family, and calls them by their first names. She would know Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Adonis or any of the other fixed stars the darkest night that ever blew.

"Mme. La Foy De Graw," said I, bowing with the easy grace of a gentleman of the old school, "would you mind peering into the future for me about a half dollar's worth, not necessarily for publication, et cetera."

"Certainly not. What would you like to know?"

"Why, I want to know all I can for the money,"

I said, in a bantering tone. "Of course I do not wish to know what I already know. It is what I do not know now that I desire to know. Tell me what I do not know, Madam. I will detain you but a moment."

She gave me back my large, round half dollar and told me that she was already weary. She asked me to excuse her. She was willing to unveil the future to me in her poor, weak way, but she could not guarantee to let a large flood of light into the darkened basement of a benighted mind for half a dollar.

"You can tell me what year and on what day of what month you were born," said Mme. La Foy, "and I will outline your life to you. I generally require a lock of the hair, but in your case we will dispense with it."

I told her when I was born and the circumstances, as well as I could recall them.

"This brings you under Venus, Mercury and Mars. These three planets were in conjunction at the time of your birth. You were born when the sign was wrong, and you have had more or less trouble ever since. Had you been born when the sign was in the head or the heart, instead of the feet, you would not have spread out over the ground so much.

"Your health is very good, as is the health of those generally who are born under the same auspices that you were. People who are born under the reign of the crab are apt to be cancerous. You, however, have great lung power and wonderful gastric possibilities. Yet, at times, you would be very easily upset. A strong cyclone that would unroof a courthouse or tip over a through train would also upset you, in spite of your broad firm feet, if the wind got behind one of your ears.

"You will be married early and you will be very happy, though your wife will not enjoy herself very much. Your wife will be much happier during her second marriage.