"All right, father; there'll be no difficulty there. I can sell my own pony, and Rosebud won't eat more nor take up more room than poor Punch; and I shall put a few sovereigns into my own pocket too by selling my own pony." "That is to say, if you are the winner, my boy; but there will be ninety-nine chances to one against that." "Oh yes, I know that, father; but `nothing venture, nothing win,' says the proverb.--Well, Amos, what do you say? will you be one?" "I cannot," said his brother gravely. "Oh, why not?" asked his sister; "it will be so nice for dear Walter to have that beautiful creature for his own." "I do not approve of raffles, and cannot therefore take part in one," replied Amos. "Why, surely," she exclaimed, "there can be no harm in them." "I cannot agree with you there, dear Julia," he said. "I believe raffles to be utterly wrong in principle, and so there must be harm in them. They are just simply a mild form of gambling, and nothing got by them can be got fairly and strictly honestly." "Eh! that's strong indeed," cried Walter. "Not too strong," said his brother. "There are but three ways of getting anything from another person's possession honestly: you must either earn it, as a man gets money from his master by working for it; or you must give a fair equivalent for it, either so much money as it is marketably worth, or something in exchange which will be worth as much to the person from whom you are getting the thing as the thing he is parting with is worth to him; or you must have it as a free gift from its owner. Now a raffle fulfils none of these conditions. Take the case of this mare Rosebud. Suppose you pay your guinea, and prove the successful person. You have not earned Rosebud, for you have not given a hundred guineas' worth of labour for her. You have not given a fair equivalent, such as an equally good horse or something else of the same value, nor an equivalent in money, for you have given only a guinea for what is worth a hundred guineas. Nor have you received her as a free gift." "I quite agree with you, Amos," said his father; "you have put it very clearly. I think these raffles, in which you risk your little in the hope of getting some one else's much, are thoroughly unwholesome and dangerous in principle, and are calculated to encourage a taste for more serious gambling." "But stop there, please, dear father," said Walter. "When a man gives his guinea for what is worth one hundred guineas, or when a man bets say one to ten, if he wins, does not the loser make a free gift to him? There is no compulsion. He stakes his bigger sum willingly, and loses it willingly." "Nay, not so," said Amos. "He is not willing to lose his larger sum; he makes no out-and-out gift of it. In laying his larger sum against your smaller, he does so because he is persuaded or fully expects that he shall get your money and not lose his own." "I quite agree with you," said Mr Huntingdon again.