onviction that it was possible
to make a capital living at Roulette, so long as you stuck to the
colours, and avoided the Scylla of the numbers and the Charybdis of the
Zero. By degrees, then, the shyness of the neophyte wears off. Perhaps
in the course of his descent of Avernus, a revulsion of feeling takes
place, and, horror-struck and ashamed, he rushes out of the Kursaal,
determined to enter its portals no more. Then he temporizes; remembers
that there is a capital reading-room, provided with all the newspapers
and periodicals of civilized Europe, attached to the Kursaalian
premises. There can be no harm, he thinks, in glancing over "Galignani"
or the "Charivari," although under the same roof as the abhorred _Trente
et Quarante;_ but, alas! he finds _Galignani_ engaged by an acrid old
lady of morose countenance, who has lost all her money by lunch-time,
and is determined to "take it out in reading," and the _Charivari_
slightly clenched in one hand by the deaf old gentleman with the dingy
ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and the curly brown wig pushed up over
one ear, who always goes to sleep on the soft and luxurious velvet
couches of the Kursaal reading-room, from eleven till three, every day,
Sundays not excepted. The disappointed student of home or foreign news
wanders back to one of the apartments where play is going, on. In fact,
he does not know what to do with himself until table-d'hote time. You
know what the moral bard, Dr Watts says:--

"Satan finds some mischief still, For idle hands to do."

The unfledged gamester watches the play more narrowly. A stout lady in
a maroon velvet mantle, and a man with a bald head, a black patch on
his occiput, and gold spectacles, obligingly makes way for him. He finds
himself pressed against the very edge of the table. Perhaps a chair--one
of those delightfully comfortable Kursaal chairs--is vacant. He is tired
with doing nothing, and sinks into the emolliently-cushioned _fauteuil_.
He fancies that he has caught the eye of the banker, or one of the
gentlemen of the _croupe_, and that they are meekly inviting him to
try his luck. "Well, there can't be much harm in risking a florin," he
murmurs. He stakes his silver-piece on a number or a colour. He wins,
we will say, twice or thrice. Perhaps he quadruples his stake, nay,
perchance, hits on the lucky number. It turns up, and he receives
thirty-five times the amount of his _mise_. Thenceforth it is all over
with that ingenu