ll upon of an equal gravity in
their own poor way; though perhaps, too, I could not have defined them
as understandingly as I did the perplexities of my neighbor.

Happily the feat need not be attempted; I had the game, in which
troubles may be played away at least beyond the necessity for analyzing
them--the game which requires two decks and is to be played alone--the
most efficacious of those devices for the solitary which cards afford.

I had been made acquainted with its scheme and with some of its cruder
virtues by a certain illustrious soldier whom I was once much thrown
with. He confessed to me that he played it before a battle to inspire
him with coolness, and after a battle to learn wise behavior under
victory or defeat, as it might have been.

I was persuaded to learn more of it. I played the thing at first, to be
sure, as I have noticed that novices always do, with a mind so bent upon
"getting it" that I was insensible of its curative and refining
agencies.

"You haven't the secret yet," said my mentor, who watched me as I won
for the first time, and was moved to warn me by my unconcealed pride in
this achievement. "After you've played it a few years, you'll learn that
the value of it lies chiefly in losing. You'll try like the devil to
win, of course, but you'll learn not to wish for it. To win is nothing
but an endless piling up of the right cards, beginning with the ace and
ending with the king, and it only means more shuffling for next time.
But every time you lose you will learn things about everything."

It was even as he said,--it took me years to learn this true merit of
the game; and still, as he had said, I learned much from it of life.

There is a fine moment at the last shuffling of the cards, a moment when
free will and fatalism are indistinguishably merged.

I am ready to lay down eight cards in a horizontal row off my double
deck. Who will say that the precise number of shuffles I have given to
it was preordained?

"I do," exclaimed an obliging fatalist. "The sequence of every one of
those cards was determined when we were yet star-dust."

I bring confusion to him by performing half a dozen other shuffles. I am
thus far the master of my unborn game--another last shuffle to prove it,
though I shuffle clumsily enough.

I glance disdainfully at the fatalist whom I have refuted, and prepare
again to lay down the first row of cards. But the fellow comes back
with, "Those last shuffles wer