"On Selby Flat we live in style;
We'll stay right here till we make our pile.
We're sure to do it after a while,
Then good-bye to Californy!"

-Canfield's "Diary of a Forty-Niner."



The beautiful Casino at Monte Carlo stands in one of the loveliest
settings on earth. Facing the blue Mediterranean and enhanced by the
exquisitely kept marble villas of Monaco, it may justly be called the
acme of gambling institutions. It has become an institution through the
years. Time has brought it stability.

Its absolute antithesis were the gambling dens of '49. Built over-night,
destined to remain if the mines were rich, and to melt away if they
pinched out, the gambling hells were sometimes the veriest makeshifts.
Canvas covered, dirt floored, except for the dancing platform, rough
red-wood bar and tables; surrounded by all the sordidness of Hurdy Gurdy
town in which fortunes, and reputations, and lives were bid, and
shuffled, and lost, as indiscriminately as grains of dust blown into the
ever-changing sea.

The thirst for gold is universal. In those half-mad days of delirious
seeking, the princeling rubbed sleeves with the scoundrel and the clod,
and each man's ability was his only protection. Fortune played no
favorites. The tale is told of the judge who drove home in his coach
through a shallow creek. Ruin faced him for the lack of a few thousand
dollars. He took out his derringer and shot himself.