NUMBER THIRTEEN

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1408, 8 April 1912, Page 9

NUMBER THIRTEEN

In the third instalment of his "Sixty Years in the Wilderness" (now running Hi the Cornhill), .Sir Henry Lucv tells several stories about tho superstition attaching to the number 13. It was strange, lie says, to find Queen Victoria susceptible to the fetish. The subject com ins up at the dinner table of •tho late Lord Granville, when he lived in Green .Street, his lcrdship told how, whilst, still a young man, he was invited to dine with the Duke of Cambridge to meet her Majesty. At the last moment lie was disabled by an attack of gout. On tho Queen's arrival, finding the dinner guests were thirteen all told, she positively refund to sit at table. The difficulty was got over by sending for Princess Mary, at the timo too young to have been included in the original arrangement. Parnell, of all men, was a slave to this quaint superstition. There is a familiar story of his positively refusing, during an election campaign with Tim Healv, to occupy a bedroom numbered 13. Whilst in Kilmainham, there was submitted to him by his colleagues the draft of a Hill amending the Irish Land Act. On discovering that the clauses counted up to 13, he threw clown the manuscript with a gesture of terror, and refused to have anything to do with it.