rtunate is bound
to marry again, because he is like the man who broke the bank at Monte
Carlo. A man who has been unhappily married marries again because like
an unfortunate gamester he has reached the time when his luck has got
to change. The Bibliotaph then added with a smile: 'I have the idea
that many men who marry a second time do in effect what is often done
by unsuccessful gamblers at Monte Carlo; they go out and commit
suicide.'

The Bibliotaph played but few games. There was one, however, in which
he was skillful. I blush to speak of it in these days of much muscular
activity. What have golfers, and tennis-players, and makers of century
runs to do with croquet? Yet there was a time when croquet was spoken
of as 'the coming game;' and had not Clintock's friend Jennings
written an epic poem upon it in twelve books, which poem he offered to
lend to a certain brilliant young lady? But Gwendolen despised boys
and cared even less for their poetry than for themselves.

At the house of the Country Squire the Bibliotaph was able to gratify
his passion for croquet, and verily he was a master. He made a
grotesque figure upon the court, with his big frame which must stoop
mightily to take account of balls and short-handled mallets, with his
agile manner, his uncovered head shaggy with its barbaric profusion of
hair (whereby some one was led to nickname him Bibliotaph Indetonsus),
with the scanty black alpaca coat in which he invariably played--a
coat so short in the sleeves and so brief in the skirt that the figure
cut by the wearer might almost have passed for that of Mynheer Ten
Broek of many-trowsered memory. But it was vastly more amusing to
watch him than to play with him. He had a devil 'most undoubted.' Only
with the help of black art and by mortgaging one's soul would it have
been possible to accomplish some of the things which he accomplished.
For the materials of croquet are so imperfect at best that chance is
an influential element. I've seen tennis-players in the intervals of
_their_ game watch the Bibliotaph with that superior smile suggestive
of contempt for the puerility of his favorite sport. They might even
condescend to take a mallet for a while to amuse _him_; but presently
discomfited they would retire to a game less capricious than croquet
and one in which there was reasonable hope that a given cause would
produce its wonted effect.

The Bibliotaph played strictly for the purpose of winning, and too