which happy eventuality is announced by the dealer crying--
"_Rouge gagne_," "Red wins," or "_Rouge perd_," "Red

loses." These two parcels, one for each colour, make a _coup_.
The same number of parcels being dealt for each colour, the

dealer says, "_Apres_," "After." This is a "doublet,"
called in the amiable French tongue, "_un refait_," by which

neither party wins, unless both colours come to _thirty-
one_, which the dealer announces by saying, "_Un refait Trente-

et-un_, and he wins half the stakes posted on both colours. He,
however, does not take the money, but removes it to the middle

line, and the players may change the _venue_ of their stakes if
they please. This is called the first "prison," or _la

premiere prison_, and, if they win their next event, they draw
the entire stake. In case of another "_refait_," the money is

removed into the third line, which is called the second prison.
So you see that there are wheels within wheels, and Lord

Chancellor King's dictum, that walls can be built higher, but
there should be no prison within a prison, is sometimes reversed.

When this happens the dealer wins all.
`The cards are sometimes cut for which colour shall be dealt

first; but, in general, the first parcel is for _black_, and the
second for _red_. The odds against a "_refait_" turning up are

usually reckoned as 63 to 1. The bankers, however, acknowledge
that they expect it twice in three deals, and there are generally

from twenty-nine to thirty-two coups in each deal. The odds in
favour of winning several times are about the same as in the

game of Pharaon, and are as delusive. `He who goes to Hombourg
and expects to see any melodramatic manifestation of rage,

disappointment, and despair in the losing players, reckons
without his host. Winners or losers seldom speak above a

whisper; and the only sound that is heard above the suppressed
buzz of conversation, the muffled jingle of the money on the

green cloth, the "sweep" of the croupiers' rakes, and the
ticking of the very ornate French clocks on the mantel-pieces, is

the impassibly metallic voice of the banker, as he proclaims his
"_Rouge perd_," or "_Couleur gagne_." People are too genteel

at Hombourg-von-der-Hohe to scream, to yell, to fall into
fainting fits, or go into convulsions, because they have lost

four or five thousand francs or so in a single coup.
`I have heard of one gentleman, indeed, who, after a ruinous

loss, put a pistol to his head, and discharging it, spattered his
brains over the Roulette wheel. It was said that the banker,

looking up calmly, called out--`_Triple Zero,' `Treble
Nothing_,'--a case as yet unheard of in the tactics of Roulette,

but signifying annihilation,--and that, a cloth being thrown over
the ensanguined wheel, the bank of that particular table was

declared to be closed for the day. Very probably the whole story
is but a newspaper _canard_, devised by the proprietors of some

rival gaming establishment, who would have been delighted to see
the fashionable Hombourg under a cloud.

`When people want to commitsuicide at Hombourg, they do it
genteelly; early in the morning, or late at night, in the

solitude of their own apartments at the hotels. It would be
reckoned a gross breach of good manners to scandalize the refined

and liberaladministration of the Kursaal by undisguised _felo-
de-se_. The devil on two _croupes_ at Hombourg is the very

genteelest of demons imaginable. He ties his tail up with
cherry-coloured ribbon, and conceals his cloven foot in a patent-

leather boot. All this gentility and varnish, and elegant
veneering of the sulphurous pit, takes away from him, if it does

not whollyextinguish, the honour and loathing for a common
gaming-house, with which the mind of a wellured English

youth has been sedulously imbued by his parents and guardians.
He has very probably witnessed the performance of the

"Gamester" at the theatre, and been a spectator of the
remorseful agonies of Mr Beverly, the virtuous sorrows of

Mrs B., and the dark villanies of Messieurs Dawson and Bates.
`The first visit of the British youth to the Kursaal is usually

paid with fear and trembling. He is with difficulty persuaded to
enter the accursed place. When introduced to the saloons--

delusively called _de conversation_, he begins by staring fixedly
at the chandeliers, the ormolu clocks, and the rich draperies,

and resolutely averts his eyes from the serried ranks of punters
or players, and the Pactolus, whose sands are circulating on the

green cloth on the table. Then he thinks there is no very great
harm in looking on, and so peeps over the shoulder of a

moustached gamester, who perhaps whispers to him in the interval
between two coups, that if a man will only play carefully, and be

content with moderate gains, he may win sufficient--taking the
good days and the evil days in a lump--to keep him in a decent

kind of affluence all the year round. Indeed, I once knew a
croupier--we used to call him Napoleon, from the way he took

snuff from his waistcoat pocket, who was in the way of expressing
a grave conviction that it was possible to make a capital

living at Roulette, so long as you stuck to the colours, and
avoided the Scylla of the numbers and the Charybdis of the Zero.

By degrees, then, the shyness of the neophyte wears off. Perhaps
in the course of his descent of Avernus, a revulsion of feeling

takes place, and, horror-struck and ashamed, he rushes out of the
Kursaal, determined to enter its portals no more. Then he

temporizes; remembers that there is a capital reading-room,
provided with all the newspapers and periodicals of civilized

Europe, attached to the Kursaalian premises. There can be no
harm, he thinks, in glancing over "Galignani" or the

"Charivari," although under the same roof as the abhorred
_Trente et Quarante;_ but, alas! he finds _Galignani_ engaged by

an acrid old lady of morose countenance, who has lost all her
money by lunch-time, and is determined to "take it out in

reading," and the _Charivari_ slightly clenched in one hand by
the deaf old gentleman with the dingy ribbon of the Legion of

Honour, and the curly brown wig pushed up over one ear, who
always goes to sleep on the soft and luxuriousvelvet couches of

the Kursaal reading-room, from eleven till three, every day,
Sundays not excepted. The disappointed student of home or

foreign news wanders back to one of the apartments where
play is going, on. In fact, he does not know what to do

with himself until table-d'hote time. You know what the moral
bard, Dr Watts says:--

"Satan finds some mischief still,
For idle hands to do."

The unfledged gamester watches the play more narrowly. A stout
lady in a maroon velvetmantle, and a man with a bald head, a

black patch on his occiput, and gold spectacles, obligingly makes
way for him. He finds himself pressed against the very edge of

the table. Perhaps a chair--one of those delightfully
comfortable Kursaal chairs--is vacant. He is tired with doing

nothing, and sinks into the emolliently-cushioned _fauteuil_. He
fancies that he has caught the eye of the banker, or one of the

gentlemen of the _croupe_, and that they are meeklyinviting him
to try his luck. "Well, there can't be much harm in risking a

florin," he murmurs. He stakes his silver-piece on a number or
a colour. He wins, we will say, twice or thrice. Perhaps he

quadruples his stake, nay, perchance, hits on the lucky number.
It turns up, and he receives thirty-five times the amount of his

_mise_. Thenceforth it is all over with that ingenuous
British youth. The Demon of Play has him for his own, and he may

go on playing and playing until he has lost every florin of his
own, or as many of those belonging to other people as he can beg

or borrow. Far more fortunate for him would it be in the long
run, if he met in the outset with a good swinging loss. The

burnt child _DOES_ dread the fire as a rule; but there is this