d never working.

And when the schoolmaster came to the city and his brother knew that
he had eight hundred dollars, he came to him and got him drinking and
persuaded him to hand over the eight hundred dollars and to let him put
it into the Louisiana State lottery. In those days the Louisiana Lottery
had not yet been forbidden the use of the mails, and you could buy a
ticket for anything from one dollar up. The Grand Prize was two hundred
thousand dollars, and the Seconds were a hundred thousand each.

So the brother persuaded the schoolmaster to put the money in. He said
he had a system for buying only the tickets with prime numbers, that
won't divide by anything, and that it must win. He said it was a
mathematical certainty, and he figured it out with the schoolmaster in
the back room of a saloon, with a box of dominoes on the table to show
the plan of it. He told the schoolmaster that he himself would only take
ten per cent of what they made, as a commission for showing the system,
and the schoolmaster could have the rest.

So, in a mad moment, the schoolmaster handed over his roll of money, and
that was the last he ever saw of it.

The next morning when he was up he was fierce with rage and remorse
for what he had done. He could not go back to the school, and he had no
money to go forward. So he stayed where he was in the little hotel where
he had got drunk, and went on drinking. He looked so fierce and unkempt
that in the hotel they were afraid of him, and the bar-tenders watched
him out of the corners of their eyes wondering what he would do; because
they knew that there was only one end possible, and they waited for it
to come. And presently it came. One of the bar-tenders went up to the
schoolmaster's room to bring up a letter, and he found him lying on the
bed with his face grey as ashes, and his eyes looking up at the ceiling.
He was stone dead. Life had beaten him.

And the strange thing was that the letter that the bartender carried
up that morning was from the management of the Louisiana Lottery. It
contained a draft on New York, signed by the treasurer of the State of
Louisiana, for two hundred thousand dollars. The schoolmaster had won
the Grand Prize.

The above story, I am afraid, is a little gloomy. I put it down merely
for the moral it contained, and I became so absorbed in telling it that
I almost forgot what the moral was that it was meant to convey. But I
think the idea is that if the schoolm