ame number for years, but more frequently changing after
each unsuccessful experiment. A French gentleman in Havana assured me
that his tickets had already cost him seven thousand dollars. "And now,"
said he, "I cannot withdraw, for I cannot lose what I have already paid.
The number has not been up once in eight years; its turn must come soon.
If I were to sell my ticket, some one would be sure to draw the great
prize with it the week after." This, perhaps, is not very unlike the
calculations of business risks most in vogue in our great cities. A
single ticket costs an ounce (seventeen dollars); but you are constantly
offered fractions, to an eighth or a sixteenth. There are ticket-brokers
who accommodate the poorer classes with interests to the amount of ten
cents, and so on. Thus, for them, the lottery replaces the savings-bank,
with entire uncertainty of any return, and the demoralizing process of
expectation thrown into the bargain. The negroes invest a good deal of
money in this way, and we heard in Matanzas a curious anecdote on this
head. A number of negroes, putting their means together, had
commissioned a ticket-broker to purchase and hold for them a certain
ticket. After long waiting and paying up, news came to Matanzas that the
ticket had drawn the $100,000 prize. The owners of the negroes were in
despair at this intelligence. "Now my cook will buy himself," says one;
"my _calesero_ will be free," says another; and so on. The poor slaves
ran, of course, in great agitation, to get their money. But, lo! the
office was shut up. The rascal broker had absconded. He had never run
the risk of purchasing the ticket; but had coolly appropriated this and
similar investments to his own use, preferring the bird in the hand to
the whole aviary of possibilities. He was never heard of more; but
should he ever turn up anywhere, I commend him as the fittest subject
for Lynch-law on record.

Well, as I have told you, all these golden chances wait for you at the
Dominica, and many Americans buy, and look very foolish when they
acknowledge it. The Nassauese all bought largely during their short
stay; and even their little children held up with exultation their
fragments of tickets, all good for something, and bad for something,
too.

If you visit the Dominica in the evening, you find the same crowd, only
with a sprinkling of women, oftenest of your own country, in audacious
bonnets, and with voices and laughter which bring the