backs to the wall; for we shall think then,
as that Roman satirist thought nineteen
hundred years ago, that we have eaten
enough, and drunk enough, and played the
fool enough, and that it is tempus abire—
time for us to go.

But of that pleasant perdition Gambling a
man never tires. No man ever tires of pitch
and toss as long as he has an arm to pitch
with, or a penny to toss. The gambler requires
neither food nor drink, sleep nor raiment. As
long as he has hands and a voice he will
rattle the bones and bet; when he has
paralysis on his tongue and chalk-stones on his
fingers, he will get his neighbour to throw the
dice and call the mains for him: but gamble
still. Addiction to play has not only the
power of making the heart hard as the
nether millstone, but it will confer insensibility
to pain, and indifference to privation.
It will even vanquish the great edax rerum
—Time—and give the votaries of play longevity;
for unless the gambler's career be cut
short by a quick despair and sudden suicide,
he will outlive wives, children, friends, fortune,
and will see new generations spring up whose
fathers he has fleeced, or whose
grandfathers have fleeced him, and,—grayhaired,
gamble still. I know a white-headed old
punter now, whose limbs are all in a quiver
with the palsy, who has been ruined and
hoping scores of times for the last half-
century. He says that if I will only lend him
forty pounds, and go with him to Hombourg,
he will show me how the red must turn up,
and he and I win an incalculable fortune.
He comes to me with the theory of his
infallible martingale engrossed on foolscap like
an indenture. He brings packs of cards, and
trembling shows me the combinations that
must render gain certain. He picks out with
a pin the chances of red against black upon a
gambler's almanack. He nurses his martingale
as old women, thirty years ago, used to nurse
cabalistic numbers in the lottery; numbers
of which they had dreamed, or which had
been sold to them by fortune-tellers, or which
they had picked up in the street, and which
were always to bring them the great prize,
and wealth, but never did.

Look at the perseverance, persistence,
incapacity of fatigue of gamblers. Consider
once more Cardinal Mazarin on his death-
bed. The last bulletin has been issued. His
sovereign and master here below has made
up his mind to lose his faithful servant, and
has even so far recovered from the first shock
of his grief as to give his place to another.
The pallid spectre with the equal footsteps is
waiting at the cardinal's door, like the printer's
boy, at mine, for copy; his friends are gathered
round his bed; he has had unction, absolution,
tears, thanks, blessings; and what is
the cardinal doing? Is he gathering the
clothes over his head, or turning his face to
the wall, or murmuring like Hadrian, Animula
vagula blandula! no; he is sitting up in bed
playing at cards with the ladies of the court
—the ladies with frizzled ringlets and low-
necked dresses! There is an awful story I have
read somewhere of a man who refused to die:
who in extremis, had the card-table drawn up
to his bedside and strong meats and drinks
placed upon it, and so held the cards against
Death: but Death had all the trumps, and
the man lost the game. Consider this. The
approach of death softens most men. The
grim warrior becomes like unto a baby; the
reprobate wishes he could live his life over
again; the condemned criminal talks of his
innocent school days, and his dead mother;
the callous old knave Falstaff babbles of green
fields; but the gambler relinquishes his hold
of the cards or the dice-box only with his
life. He will dice with the devil on the
banks of the pit of perdition till he falls into
it, for ever.

If I were to go to history or to antiquity I
could find instances, and relate anecdotes, of
that persistence .and utter absorption to
extraneous influences, which mark gamblers as
with a hot iron, enough to till this volume at
the end of the half year. But I need not go
even as far back as that Duke of Norfolk,
in King William the Third's time, whose
servant deposed on a trial, that his master
would stop away for weeks together at play,
and would only send home when he had lost
all his gold. I need not search the Annals of
the Four Masters for that fine old Irish
gambling tradition of the two bogtrotters, who
for eleven consecutive days and nights played
at shove halfpenny on the back of a broken
pair of bellows. I need not cross the Atlantic
to narrate to you the bold spirit for play of
Hon. Elkanah Mush, of the United States
Senate, who, with the exception of the
interregna of drinks and cutting fresh tobacco-
plugs, passed the whole of four voyages, per
steamer, from St. Louis to New Orleans and
back again, in the exciting and national game
of Poker (playing with a Texan land-speculator)
and losing thereat twenty-five thousand
dollars, five hundred niggers, and a double-
barrelled rifle, besides hypothecating two
cotton crops, not yet sown. I have but to
look at home, and not much farther than the
extremity of my own nose, for such instances
and anecdotes. Go to the half built-upon
slums behind Battlebridge, hard by the
Great Northern Railway terminus. Take a
walk, any Sunday morning, to the arches of
the Greenwich Railway; to the muddy shores
of the Thames above Millbank; you will find
groups of boys—some coster boys, some thief
boys, some boys of whom it is difficult to say
more by way of description save that they
are boys, and dirty and ragged,—squatting
in the mud, among the rubbish, the broken
bricks, the dust-heaps, and the fragments of
timber; playing for half-pence, for buttons
and marbles when they have no money—these
boys will gamble for hours and hours with a
rapt eagerness, with a feverish determination,