by the tables in the gaming-rooms of Monte Carlo. Such are the
sentences to which devotees of the fickle goddess, Chance, listen
hour after hour as the day wears itself out from early morning to
late evening in that beautiful, cruel, enchanting earthly paradise,
whose shores are washed by the bluest sea in the world, whose gardens
are dotted with globes of golden fruit, and plumed with feathery
palms, and where, as you wander in and out among the delicious
shadowy foliage, you hear, incessantly, the sound of guns, and may,
now and then, catch sight of some doomed creature with delicate
white breast and broken wing, dropping, helpless and bleeding, into
the still dark waters below the cliff. A wicked place! A cruel
place! Heartless, bitter, pitiless, inhuman! And yet, so beautiful!

I stood, on this particular afternoon, just opposite a young man
seated at one of the rouge et noir tables. As my glance wandered
from face to face among the players, it was arrested by his,--a
singularly pallid, thin, eager face; remarkably eager, even in
such a place and in such company as this. He seemed about twenty-
five, but he had the bowed and shrunken look of an invalid, and
from time to time he coughed terribly, the ominous cough of a person
with lungs half consumed by tubercle. He had not the air of a man
who gambles for pleasure; nor, I thought, that of a spendthrift
or a "ne'er-do-weel;" disease, not dissipation, had hollowed his
cheeks and set his hands trembling, and the unnatural light in his
eyes was born of fever rather than of greed. He played anxiously
but not excitedly, seldom venturing on a heavy stake, and watching
the game with an intentness which no incident diverted. Suddenly
I saw a young girl make her way through the throng towards him.
She was plainly dressed, and had a sweet, sad face and eyes full
of tenderness. She touched him on the shoulder, stooped over him,