perform it, even if he were compelled to do so in the presence of
Colonel Schmoff.

Doodles soon went. He could not sit long with the simple gratification
of a cigar, without gin-and-water or other comfort of that kind, even
though the eloquence of Count Pateroff might be excited in his favor. He
was a man, indeed, who did not love to sit still, even with the comfort
of gin-and-water. An active little man was Captain Boodle, always doing
something or anxious to do something in his own line of business. Small
speculations in money, so concocted as to leave the risk against him
smaller than the chance on his side, constituted Captain Boodle's trade;
and in that trade he was indefatigable, ingenious, and, to a certain
extent, successful. The worst of the trade was this: that though he
worked at it about twelve hours a day, to the exclusion of all other
interests in life, he could only make out of it an income which would
have been considered a beggarly failure at any other profession. When he
netted a pound a day he considered himself to have done very well; but
he could not do that every day in the week. To do it often required
unremitting exertion. And then, in spite of all his care, misfortunes
would come. "A cursed garron, of whom nobody had ever heard the name! If
a man mayn't take the liberty with such a brute as that, when is he to
take a liberty?" So had he expressed himself plaintively, endeavoring to
excuse himself when on some occasion a race had been won by some outside
horse which Captain Boodle had omitted to make safe in his betting-book.
He was regarded by his intimate friends as a very successful man; but I
think myself that his life was a mistake. To live with one's hands ever
daubed with chalk from a billiard-table, to be always spying into
stables and rubbing against grooms, to put up with the narrow lodgings
which needy men encounter at race meetings, to be day after day on the
rails running after platers and steeple-chasers, to be conscious on all
occasions of the expediency of selling your beast when you are hunting,
to be counting up little odds at all your spare moments--these things do
not, I think, make a satisfactory life for a young man. And for a man
that is not young, they are the very devil! Better have no digestion
when you are forty than find yourself living such a life as that!
Captain Boodle would, I think, have been happier had he contrived to get
himself employed as a tax-gatherer or an