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events, preceded by no indicia, belongs only to omniscience. Did they not teach you that much at Oxford?" "They taught me very little at Oxford."

"Fault of the place, eh? You taught them something, though; and the present conversation reminds 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 across 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 a drift 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 alternation. Have you not observed this at trente et quarante!"

"No."

"Then cards."

you have not watched the

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

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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 mad.

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.

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 are two. 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 ce n'est pas le petit avantage qu'elle tire du refait quoique cela y est pour quelquechose, c'est la témérité de ceux qui perdent, et la timidité de ceux qui gagnent."

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

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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.'

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

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. Si 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, broken last week."

"A bank was

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

14

"Oh yes, they do. It is shut on Good Friday."

"You surprise me. Only three 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. have reduced your income, that is You 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. Under 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. may be so. It 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 instruct 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 again. After my lucid interval has expired, I fall in with some woman who seems not like

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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."

If she is as

"Not a bit of it. of a peacock or a guinea-hen-and, beautiful as an angel, with the voice 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 my time is up, and the lovely, melowhen two events coincide-when dious female comes-then I am lost. her five minutes, I know my fate, Before I have seen her and heard and I never resist it. I never can; Then commences a little drama, all that is a curious part of the mania. the acts of which are stale copies; yet each time they take me by surprise, as if they were new. of past experience, I begin all conIn spite fidence 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.

only on the surface. One looks too They seem to vary 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. Andodge; she is so off-handed, she other comes the frank and candid shows me it is not worth her while the other, and with as little disto betray she deceives me, like crimination. 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

baby lips below outlie the hoariest male fox in the Old Jewry. But, to complete the delusion, all my sweethearts and wives are romantic and poetical skin-deep, or they would not attract me; and all turn out vulgar to the core. By their lovers alone can you ever know them. By the men they can't love, and the men they do love, you find these creatures, that imitate sentiment so divinely, are hard, prosaic, vulgar, little things, thinly gilt and double varnished."

"They are much better than we are; but you don't know how to take them," said Severne, with the calm superiority of success.

"No," replied Vizard, drily; "curse me if I do. Well, I did hope I had out-grown my mania, as I have done the toothache; for this time I had passed the fatal period, the three years. It is nearly four years now since I went through the established process, -as fixed beforehand as the dyer's or the cotton-weaver's, adored her, trusted her blindly, suspected her, watched her, detected her, left her. By the by, she was my wife, the last: but that made no difference; she was neither better nor worse than the rest, and her methods and idiotic motives of deceit identical. Well, Ned, I was mistaken. Yesterday night I met my Fate once

more.

"Where? in Frankfort?" "No: at Homburg; at the opera. You must give me your word not to tell a soul."

"I pledge you my word of hon

our."

"Well; the lady who sang the part of 'Siebel.'"

"Siebel?" muttered Severne. "Yes," said Vizard, dejectedly. Severne fixed his eyes on his friend with a strange expression of confusion and curiosity, as if he could not take it all in. But he

said nothing, only looked very hard all the time.

Vizard burst out: "O miseras hominum menteis, o pectora cæca!" There I sat, in the stalls, a happy man comparatively, because my heart, though full of scars, was at peace, and my reason, after periodical abdications, had resumed its throne for good; so I, weak mortal, fancied. Siebel' appeared; tall, easy, dignified, and walking like a wave; modest, fair, noble, great, dreamy, and, above all, divinely sad.

as

The soul of womanhood and music poured from her honey lips; she conquered all my senses: I felt something like a bolt of ice run down my back. I ought to have jumped up, and fled the theatre. I wish I had. But I never do. I am incurable. The charm deepened; and when she had sung Le Parlate d'Amor' no mortal ever sang and looked it, she left the stage; and carried my heart and soul away with her. What chance had I? Here shone all the beauties that adorn the body, all the virtues and graces that embellish the soul; they were wedded to poetry and ravishing music, and gave and took enchantment. I saw my paragon glide away, like a goddess, past the scenery, and I did not see her meet her lover at the next step,-a fellow with a wash-leather face, greasy locks in a sausage roll, and his hair shaved off his forehead, and snatch a pot of porter from his hands, and drain it to the dregs, and say, 'It is all right, Harry; that fetched 'em.' But I know, by experience, she did: so sauve qui peut; dear friend and fellow-lunatic, for my sake and yours, leave Frankfort with me tomorrow."

Severne hung his head, and thought hard. Here was a new and wonderful turn. He felt all manner of strange things; a pang of

jealousy for one. He felt that, on every account, it would be wise to go; and, indeed, dangerous to stay. But a mania is a mania, and so he could not. "Look here, old fellow," he said; "if the opera was on to-morrow, I would leave my three hundred behind me, and sacrifice myself to you, sooner than expose you to the fascinations of so captivating a woman as Ina Klosking." "Ina Klosking? Is that her name? How do you know?"

"I-I-fancy I heard so." "Why, she was not announced. Ina Klosking! it is a sweet name," and he sighed.

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"But you are quite safe from her for one day," continued Severne, so you must be reasonable. I will go with you, Tuesday, as early as you like; but do be a good fellow, and let me have the five hundred, to try my system with to-morrow."

Vizard looked sad, and made no reply.

Severne got impatient. "Why, what is it to a rich fellow like you? If I had twelve thousand acres in a ring fence, no friend would ask me twice for such a trifling sum."

Vizard, for the first time, wore a supercilious smile at being so misunderstood, and did not deign a reply.

Severne went on mistaking his man: "I can give you bills for the money, and for the three hundred you did lend me.”

Vizard did not receive this as expected. "Bills?" said he, gravely. "What, do you do that sort of thing as well?"

"Why not, pray? So long as I'm the holder, not the drawer nor the acceptor. Besides, they are not accommodation bills, but good commercial paper."

"You are a merchant, then; are you?"

"Yes; in a small way. If you will allow me, I will explain."

He did so and to save comments, yet enable the reader to appreciate his explanation, the true part of it is printed in italics; the mendacious portion in ordinary type.

"My estate in Huntingdonshire is not very large; and there are mortgages on it, for the benefit of other members of my family. I was always desirous to pay off these mortgages; and took the best advice I could. I have got an uncle: he lives in the city. He put me on to a good thing. I bought a share in a trading vessel; she makes short trips, and turns her cargo often. She will take out paper to America, and bring back raw cotton: she will land that at Liverpool, and ship English hardware and cotton fabrics for the Mediterranean and Greece, and bring back currants from Xante, and lemons from Portugal. She goes for the nimble shilling. Well, you know ships wear out and if you varnish them rotten, and insure them high, and they go to glory, Mr Plimsoll is down on you like a ham

mer.

So, when she had paid my purchase-money three times over, some fellows in the city made an offer for 'The Rover:' that was her name. My share came to twelve hundred, and my uncle said I was to take it. Now I always feel bound by what he decides. They gave me four bills, for four hundred, three hundred, three hundred, and two hundred. The four hundred was paid at maturity. The others are not due yet. I have only to send them to London, and I can get the money back by Thursday: but you want me to start on Tuesday."

"That is enough," said Vizard, wearily; "I will be your banker, and

"You are a good fellow," said Severne, warmly.

"No, no ; I am a weak fellow, and an injudicious one. But it is the

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