Like the spellbinder, the oracle frequently builds on the
look-on-this-picture-and-then-on-that plan.
"This is a strong line," mumbles the palmist. "You will meet a man
with blue eyes who will help you, but beware of a man with dark hair."
Sometimes the helper has light hair and the man to be avoided black
eyes. But invariably the good friend of the future is blond and the
devil is brunette. No seer would any more think of changing that
color scheme than the writer of a melodrama would dare stage a villain
who didn't have hair and mustache as black as night. That prediction
is one of the traditions of the art, and no future has ever been
complete without the dark and the light men or the dark and the light
woman, as the case might be.
One of the most famous of fortune tellers, a woman, died suddenly. She
had been reading cards in the same house for forty years, and on the
day of her funeral her house was crowded with mourners, whose future
she had foreseen with so much shrewdness that not one of the 200 or
more men and women who filed by the coffin, to view the body had any
fault to find with the services she had rendered. On the contrary,
they compared notes, each trying to pay the best tribute to the dead
by telling the most wonderful story of her predictions.