-SIEVES!" Then he affected to start. "What is this? I spy a rational creature out on yonder balcony. I hasten to join him. 'Birds of a feather,' you know" and with that he went out to his favourite, and never looked behind him.

The young ladies, indignant at the contempt the big man had presumed to cast upon the constant soul of woman, turned two red faces and four sparkling eyes to each other, with the instinctive sympathy of the jointly injured; but, remembering in time, turned sharply round again, and presented napes, and so sat sullen.

Thereupon the ingenious Fanny resolved to make a splash of some sort, and disturb stagnation. She suddenly cried out, "La! and the man is gone away: so what is the use?" This remark she was careful to level at bare space.

Zoe, addressing the same person -space, to wit-inquired of him if anybody in his parts knew to whom this young lady was addressing her self.

"To a girl that is too sensible not to see the folly of quarrelling about a man-when he is gone," said Fanny.

"Come, cuddle me quick!"

Zoe was all round her neck in a moment, like a lace scarf, and there was violent kissing, with a tear or two.

Then they put an arm round each other's waists, and went all about the premises intertwined like snakes; and Zoe gave Fanny her cameo brooch, the one with the pearls round it.

The person to whom Vizard fled from the tongue of beauty was a delightful talker: he read two or three newspapers every day, and recollected the best things. Now it is not everybody can remember a thousand disconnected facts and recall them apropos. He was various, fluent, and above all superficial; and such are your best conversers; they have something good and strictly ephemeral to say on everything, and don't know enough of anything to impale their hearers. In my youth there talked in Pall Mall a gentleman known as "Conversation Sharp." He eclipsed everybody. Even Macaulay paled. Sharp talked all the blessed afternoon, and grave men listened enchanted; and of all he said, nothing stuck. Where be now your Sharpiana? The learned may be compared to mines; these desultory charmers are more like the ornamental cottage near Staines, forty or fifty rooms, and the whole structure one storey high. The mine teems with solid wealth; but you must grope and trouble to come to it it is easier and pleasanter to run about the cottage with a lot of rooms all on the ground-floor.

The mind and body both get into habits-sometimes apart, sometimes in conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its lower form of mechanical labour: it is your clod that toddles about labouring. The

If

Peripatetics did not endure their method was not suited to man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We sit at the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndall; and we sit to Bacon and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing or walking, we love to take brains easy. this delightful chatterbox had been taken down shorthand and printed, and Vizard had been set down to Severni opuscula, 10 vols.-and, mind you, Severne had talked all ten by this time-the Barfordshire squire and old Oxonian would have cried out for 66 more matter with less words," and perhaps have even fled for relief to some shorter trea

"Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas

Gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago Severni."

But, alas! after an hour of touchand-go, of superficiality and soft delight, the desultory charmer fell on a subject he had studied. So then he bored his companion for the first time in all the tour.

But, to tell the honest truth, Mr. Severne had hitherto been pleasing his friend with a cold-blooded purpose. His preliminary gossip, that made the time fly so agreeably, was intended to oil the way; to lubricate the passage of a premeditated pill. As soon as he had got Vizard into perfect good-humour, he said, apropos of nothing that had passed, "By the by, old fellow, that five

"I don't mean to. But I am determined to win back the three hundred, and a great deal more, before I leave this. I have discovered a system, an infallible one."

"I am sorry to hear it," said Harrington, gravely. "That is the second step on the road to ruin; the gambler with a system is the confirmed maniac."

"What! because other systems have been tried, and proved to be false? Mine is untried, and it is mere prejudice to condemn it unheard."

'Propound it then," said Vizard. "Only please observe the bank has got its system-you forget that; and the bank's system is to take a positive advantage, which must win in the long-run; therefore all counter-systems must lose in the long

"But the bank is tied to a longrun, the individual player is not."

This reply checked Vizard for a moment, and the other followed up his advantage. "Now, Vizard, be reasonable. What would the trifling advantage the bank derives from an incident which occurs only once in twenty-eight deals, avail against a player who could foresee at any given deal whether the card that was going to come up the nearest thirty, would be on the red or black?"

"No avail at all. God Almighty could break the bank every afternoon. Après? as we say in France. Do you pretend to omniscience?" "Not exactly."

66

Well, but prescience of isolated

re

"Fault of the place, eh? You taught them something, though; and the present conversation minds me of it. In your second term, when every other man is still quizzed and kept down as a freshman, you were already a leader-a chief of misrule; you founded a whist-club in Trinity, the primmest college of all. The Dons rooted you out in college; but you did not succumb you fulfilled the saying of Sydney Smith, that Cribbage should be played in caverns, and sixpenny whist in the howling wilderness.' Ha! ha! how well I remember riding cross Bullington Green one fine afternoon, and finding four Oxford hacks haltered in a row, and the four undergraduates who had hired them on long tick sitting cross-legged under the hedge, like Turks or tailors, round a rude table with the legs sawed down to stumps! You had two packs, and a portable inkstand, and were so hard at it that I put my mare's nose right over the quartette before you saw either her or me. That hedge was like adrift of odoriferous snow with the hawthorn bloom, and primroses sparkled on its bank like topazes. The birds chirruped, the sky smiled, the sun burnt perfumes; and there sat my lord and his fellow-maniacs, snick-snackpit-pat-cutting, dealing, playing, revoking, scoring, and exchanging I.O.U.'s not worth the paper."

"All true but the revoking," said Severne, merrily. "Monster! by the memory of those youthful days, I demand a fair hearing." Then, gravely, "Hang it all, Vizard! I am not a fellow that is always intruding his affairs and his theories upon other men."

"No, no, no," said Vizard, hastily, and half apologetically; "go on."

"Well, then, of course I don't pretend to foreknowledge-but I do to experience; and you know experience teaches the wise."

"Not to fling five hundred after three. There I beg pardon. Proceed, instructor of youth."

"Do listen, then experience teaches us that luck has its laws; and I build my system on one of them. If two opposite accidents. are sure to happen equally often in a total of fifty times, people who have not observed expect them to happen turn about, and bet accordingly. But they don't happen turn about; they make short runs, and sometimes long ones. They positively avoid alteration. Have you not observed this at trente et quarante!"

"No."

"Then you have not watched the cards."

"Not much. The faces of the gamblers were always my study. They are instructive."

"Well, then, I'll give you an example outside, for the principle runs through all equal chances ;take the University boat-race: you have kept your eye on that?"

"Rather. Never missed one yet. Come all the way from Barfordshire to see it."

Well, there's an example." "Of chance? No, thank you. That goes by strength, skill, wind, endurance, chaste living, self-denial, and judicious training. Every winning boat is manned by virtues." His eye flashed, and he was as earnest all in a moment as he had been listless. A continental cynic had dubbed this insular cynic inad.

The professor of chances smiled superior. "Those things decide each individual race, and the best men win, because it happens to be the only race that is never sold.

are two.

But go farther back, and you find it is chance. It is pure chance that sends the best men up to Cambridge two or three years running, and then to Oxford. With this key, take the facts my system rests on. There The first is, that in thirty and odd races and matches, the University luck has come out equal on the river and at Lord's: the second is, the luck has seldom alternated. I don't say, never. But look at the list of events; it is published every March. You may see there the great truth that even chances shun direct alternation. In this, properly worked, lies a fortune at Homburg, where the play is square. Red gains once; you back red next time, and stop. You are on black, and win; you double. This is the game if you have only a few pounds. But with five hundred pounds you can double more courageously, and work the short run hard; and that is how losses are averted, and gains secured. Once at Wiesbaden I caught a croupier, out on a holiday. It was Good Friday, you know. I gave him a stunning dinner. He was close as wax, at first,-that might be the salt fish ; but after the rognons à la brochette, and a bottle of champagne, he let out. I remember one thing he said. 'Monsieur; ce que fait la fortune de la banque cen'est pas le petit avantage qu'elle tire du refait-quoique cela y est pour quelquechose,-cest la témerité de ceux qui perdent, et la timidité de ceux qui gagnent."

"And," says Vizard, "there is a French proverb founded on experi

ence

'C'est encore rouge qui perd,
Et encore noir,

Mais toujours blanc qui gagne. Severne, for the first time, looked angry and mortified; he turned his back, and was silent. Vizard looked at him uneasily, hesitated a moment,

66

then flung the remainder of his cigar away, and seemed to rouse himself body and soul. He squared his shoulders, as if he was going to box the Demon of play for his friend, and he let out good sense right and left, and, indeed, was almost betrayed into eloquence. "What!" he cried,you, who are so bright, and keen, and knowing in everything else, are you really so blinded by egotism and credulity as to believe that you can invent any method of betting at rouge et noir that has not been tried before you were born? Do you remember the first word in La Bruyère's famous work?"

"No," said Ned, sulkily. "Read nothing but newspapers."

"Good lad. Saves a deal of trouble. Well, he begins 'Tout est dit;' Everything has been said :' and I say that, in your business,

Si

Tout est fait; Everything has been done,' Every move has been tried before you existed, and the result of all is, that to bet against the bank, wildly or systematically, is to gamble against a rock. monumenta quæris, circumspice. Use your eyes, man. Look at the Kursaal, its luxuries, its gardens, its gilding, its attractions, all of them cheap, except the one that pays for all: all these delights, and the rents, and the croupiers, and the servants, and the income and liveries of an unprincipled prince, who would otherwise be a poor but honest gentleman with one bonne instead of thirty blazing lackeys, all come from the gains of the bank, which are the losses of the players, especially of those that have got a system."

Severne shot in, "A bank was broken last week."

"Was it? Then all it lost has returned to it, or will return to it to-night; for gamblers know no day of rest."

"Oh yes, they do. Good Friday."

It is shut on

"You surprise me. Only three hundred and sixty-four days in the year! Brainless avarice is more reasonable than I thought. Severne, yours is a very serious case. You have reduced your income, that is clear; for an English gentleman does not stay years and years abroad, unless he has outrun the constable; and I feel sure gambling has done it.

You had the fever from a boy. Bullington Green! As the twig's bent the tree's inclined.' Come, come-make a stand. We are friends. Let us help one another against our besetting foibles. Let us practise antique wisdom; let us 'know ourselves,' and leave Homburg to-morrow instead of Tuesday."

Severne looked sullen, but said nothing; then Vizard gave him too hastily credit for some of that sterling friendship, bordering on love, which warmed his own faithful breast. Unber this delusion he made an extraordinary effort; he used an argument which, with himself, would have been irresistible. "Look here," said he, "I'll-won't you have a cigar ?-there; now I'll tell you something-I have a mania as bad as yours: only mine is intermittent, thank heaven. I'm told a million women are as good as, or better than, a million men. It may be so. But when I, an individual, stake my heart on lovely woman, she always turns out unworthy. With me, the sex avoids alternation. Therefore I rail on them wholesale. It is not philosophical; but I don't do it to in struct mankind-it is to soothe my spleen. Well, would you believe it, once in every three years, in spite of my experience, I am always bitten gain. After my lucid interval has expired, I fall in with woman who seems not like

some

the rest, but an angel. Then I, though I'm averse to the sex, fall an easy, an immediate, victim to the individual."

"Love at first sight."

"Not a bit of it. If she is as beautiful as an angel, with the voice of a peacock or a guinea-hen-and, luckily for me, that is a frequent arrangement-she is no more to me than the fire-shovel. If she has a sweet voice, and pale eyes, I'm safe. Indeed I am safe against Juno, Venus, and Minerva, for two years and several months, after the last; but when two events coincide-when my time is up, and the lovely, melodious female comes-then I am lost. Before I have seen her and heard her five minutes, I know my fate, and I never resist it. I never can; that is a curious part of the mania. Then commences a little drama, all the acts of which are stale copies; yet each time they take me by surprise, as if they were new. In spite of past experience, I begin all confidence and trust: by-and-by come the subtle but well-known signs of deceit; so doubt is forced on me; and then I am all suspicion, and so darkly vigilant, that soon all is certainty; for les fourberies des femmes are diabolically subtle, but monotonous. They seem to vary only on the surface. One looks too gentle and sweet to give any creature pain; I cherish her like a tender plant: she deceives me for the coarsest fellow she can find. Another comes the frank and candid dodge; she is so off-handed, she shows me it is not worth her while to betray: she deceives me, like. the other, and with as little discrimination. The next has a face of beaming innocence, and a limpid eye that looks like transparent candour. She gazes long and calmly in my face, as if her eye loved to dwell on me-gazes with the eye of a gazelle or a young hare-and the