Telling Fortunes By Tea-Leaves

Telling Fortunes By Tea-Leaves
By Cicely Kent

Hmmm. I'm never quite sure what to make of this sort of thing. You see, Tea Guy is perfectly willing to believe that there is more to existence than what we ordinary muttonheads are able to sense. But then again nobody ever went broke preying on the great multitude of suckers Barnum alluded to.

So what's up with reading tea leaves? Is it the real deal? Damned if I know, but Cicely Kent, author of Telling Fortunes By Tea-Leaves, seems pretty darned convinced that it's on the up and up. The book is apparently in the public domain now, by the way, so you can read it for free at Project Gutenberg and various other online archives.

The "meat" of Kent's book is informative, but actually rather short - weighing in at about eight thousands words or so. The rest is given over to various sections full of information on how to actually interpret symbols that appear during a reading.

I'd venture to say that anything you'd want to know about reading tea leaves
- and probably a good bit more - is covered here. Kent runs the gamut from very down to earth, nuts and bolts advice on technique all the way to rather fine and esoteric matters of interpretation.

The book was apparently written in 1922, but the information contained here doesn't strike me as something that would have dated much in the intervening decades.

Beware though, as the author notes, "Indian tea and the cheaper mixtures"
should be avoided since they contain "so much dust and twigs" that make it difficult to get a good reading. You've been warned.