d by a burst of tears. But her eyes
were as dry as her lips, and she stared stonily, staking her napoleons
till the last was gone. This accomplished, she rose with evident intent
to leave the room, but catching sight of a friend at another table she
borrowed a handful of napoleons, and finding another table played on
as recklessly as before. In ten minutes she had lost all but a single
gold piece. Leaving the table again, she held this up between her finger
and thumb, and showed it to her friend with a hysterical little laugh.

It was her last coin, and she evidently devised it for some such
matter-of-fact purpose as paying her hotel bill. If she had turned her
back on the table and walked straight out, she might have kept her
purpose; but the ball was still rolling, and there remained a chance.
She threw down the napoleon, and the croupier raked it in amid a heap of
coin that might be better or even worse spared.

This is one of the little dramas that take place every hour in this
gilded hall, and I describe it in detail only because I chanced to be
present at the first scene and the last. Sometimes the dramas become
tragedies, and the Administration, who do all things handsomely, pay
the funeral expenses, and beg as a slight acknowledgment of their
considerate generosity that as little noise as possible may follow
the echo of the pistol-shot.

CHAPTER XIV.

A WRECK IN THE NORTH SEA.

One December afternoon in the year 1875, just as night was closing in,
the steam-tug _Liverpool_, which had left Harwich at six o'clock in the
morning, was seen steaming into the harbour with flag half-mast high.
It was quite dark when she reached the quay, but there was light
enough for the crowd collected to see rows of figures laid in the
stern of the little steamer, the faces covered with blankets. These
figures, as it presently was made known, were twelve dead bodies, the
flotsam of the wreck of the _Deutschland_. When the tug arrived at the
wreck she found her much as she had been left when the survivors had
been brought off the previous day. The two masts and the funnel were
all standing, the sails bellied out with the wind that blustered across
the sandbank. The wind was so high and the sea so rough that Captain
Corrington could not bring his tug alongside; but a boat was launched,
under the charge of the chief mate and Captain Brickerstein, of the
_Deutschland_. The chief officer and the engineer, with some sailors
from