Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 March 1889 — He Was Not Superstitious. [ARTICLE]

He Was Not Superstitious.

A well-known jeweler: “I am often asked why I keep that little, old-fash-ioned silver horseshoe in my showcase. It certainly does look out of place among my watches; it would not be at home among the diamonds either, and it would be equally a stranger in the case with the earrings and breast-pins. It was made in my father’s shop in Switzerland about forty years ago, when I was a boy, and I made it. “I made it out of a silver franc after I had been at the bench less than t month. A little French girl gave the coin to me, and, I fashioned this horseshoe with a few tools that my father would allow me to use. It was a breastpin once, and after it was made the girl wore it. About five years afterwards I brought the horsehoe and the French girl to this country with me. She was my wife then. “I had a hard fight with the world at first. We went West. Then we went South. At last we came here. After this we prospered. All this time my wife wore the horseshoe. I shouldn’t say all the time, but most of the time. Once she lost it. The same night my store was burned. The next day a boy brought the pin to me and asked me how much it was worth as old silver. He had found it on the street. I bought it back for five times its value without a question. “Twenty years ago my wife died. Among the last things she did was to ask for this pin. She gave it to me and told me to keep it always. It had been the means of our marrying, and had always brought us good fortune. With two exceptions, it has never passed out of my possession since. “When my eldest daughter was married she wore the pin on her wedding dress. She left for Europe the next day, and forgot to return it to me before she started. She had not been gone a week before my cashier disappeared with $5,000 in cash and left a large deficit in my bank balance. He was my nephew, and would have been my partner some day. During that month the grasshopper plague destroyed the crops in Kansas and I lost several thousand more in bad debts. lam not superstitious, but I cabled to my daughter for the pin and it came back by the first steamer.

“The next exception was five years ago last summer. In cleaning out the show-cases one morning a new clerk threw the pin among the scraps in the workshop to be melted up, flunking it had no value. When I missed it, it could not be found. The shop was thoroughly searched. “I advertised for it, offering a liberal reward, and my porter returned it to me and claimed the SSO. He had found it, so he said, in the ash-box in front of the store. This was one week after I had lost it. During that time my daughter’s husband was killed in a railroad accident in Illinois. Since then this old horseshoe is in the case, wheio it has lain for twenty long years. Every day and every night it goes into the safe. “No, I am not superstitious, no one can accuse me of that weakness; but it would take more money than most men have to buy that pin. I don’t believe in luck. I know that losing the pin had nothing to do with my disasters, but I won’t part with it all the same.”—Jewelers' Weekly.