ich had actually turned up at the tables on this day
or that. The general results were, I must say, most extraordinary. On
only two occasions did the operations of an entire day leave any of the
players bankrupt or without a substantial gain, though they all started
their work at different moments, and the actual details of the staking
were in no two cases the same. Throughout a long series of these
experimental meetings, the winnings were as a whole about 20 per cent.
daily on the total capital risked.

Encouraged by these results, we had no sooner mastered the system as a
mathematical scheme than we promptly made arrangements for beginning the
work in earnest. We all thought it desirable that, until it was crowned
with success, our enterprise should remain unknown to anybody except
ourselves. It was therefore settled that our journey should take place
at once--that is to say, about the end of October, at which time Monte
Carlo would be nearly empty, and we should run least risk of
encountering loquacious acquaintances or of having our secret stolen
from us by inquisitive and sinister rivals. We accordingly secured in
advance--since all the great hotels at the time in question were
closed--a suite of four bedrooms and a sitting room at a small
establishment called the Hotel de Russie. Its appointments, when we
arrived, proved to be so simple that the floor of the restaurant was
sanded; but the rooms upstairs were comfortable; and not even at the
Hotel de Paris could anything better have been found in the way of wine
or cooking.

Accordingly on a certain night we, the four precursors, were duly
assembled on the platform of Victoria Station; and Beckett, with the air
of a conspirator, appeared at the last moment, thrust into our keeping
certain notes of credit, and gave us his blessing as we seated ourselves
in the continental train. Had we been agents of a plot organized to
convulse Europe we could not have been in a condition of greater and
more carefully subdued excitement, though there was not absent from any
of us an underlying sense of comedy. In the dead of night we were having
supper at Calais, and, scanning the few other travelers who were engaged
in the same task, we were rejoicing in a sense of having escaped all
curious observation, when Jerningham gripped my arm and said: "Did you
see the man who has just gone through the door? Wasn't he your friend
W----?" He had named one of the most intimate of the Catho