Now and then some interesting personality--stranger, youth, celebrity, or other--wins heavily or loses heavily; in which case, if he plunges fiercely on, his table will be surrounded by a curious throng, their heads craning over each other’s shoulders, while he piles his gold on his combinations. Such a man or woman for the time being becomes an intensely dramatic figure. He is aware of the audacity of the thing he is doing, and he moves with conscious gestures--the manner of a grand seigneur. I saw one such later--in the _Cirque privé_ at Monte Carlo--a red-bearded man of fifty--tall, intense, graceful. It was rumored that he was a prince out of Russia--almost any one can be a prince out of Russia at Monte Carlo! He had stacks of gold and he distributed it with a lavish hand. He piled it in little golden towers over a score of numbers; and when his numbers fell wrong his towers fell with them, and the croupier raked great masses of metal into his basket. There was not the slightest indication on his pale impassive face that the loss or the gain was of the slightest interest to him. He handed crisp bills to the clerk in charge of the bank and received more gold to play his numbers. When he wearied, after a dozen failures--a breathing throng watching him with moist lips and damp, eager eyes--he rose and strolled forth to another chamber, rolling a cigarette as he went. He had lost thousands and thousands. The next morning it was lovely and sunshiny again. Sitting out on my balcony high over the surrounding land, commanding as it did all of Monte Carlo, the bay of Mentone and Cap Martin, I made many solemn resolutions. This gay life here was meretricious and artificial, I decided. Gambling was a vice, in spite of Sir Scorp’s lofty predilection for it; it drew to and around it the allied viciousness of the world, gormandizing, harlotry, wastefulness, vain-glory. I resolved here in the cool morning that I would reform. I would see something of the surrounding country and then leave for Italy where I would forget all this. I started out with Barfleur about ten to see the Oceanographical Museum and to lunch at the Princess, but the day did not work out exactly as we planned. We visited the Oceanographical Museum; but I found it amazingly dull--the sort of a thing a prince making his money out of gambling would endow. It may have vast scientific ramifications, but I doubt it. A meager collection of insects and dried specimens quickly gave me a headache. The only case that really interested me was the one containing a half-dozen octopi of large size. I stood transfixed before their bulbous centers and dull, muddy, bronze-green arms, studded with suckers. I can imagine nothing so horrible as to be seized upon by one of these things, and I fairly shivered as I stood in front of the case. Barfleur contemplated solemnly the possibility of his being attacked by one of them, monocle and all. He foresaw a swift end to his career.