ng_,'--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 commit suicide 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 liberal administration 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
wholly extinguish, 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 c