The baccarat table is covered with green cloth and is marked off in divisions with chalk or something. The banker sits in the middle, the croupier opposite. The customers fill all the chairs at the table, and the rest of the crowd are massed at their back and leaning over them to deposit chips or gold coins. Constantly money and chips are flung upon the table, and the game seems to consist in the croupier’s reaching for these things with a flexible sculling oar, and raking them home. It appeared to be a rational enough game for him, and if I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed, but I didn’t see where the entertainment of the others came in. This was because I saw without perceiving, and observed without understanding. For the widow and the orphan and the others do win money there. Once an old gray mother in Israel or elsewhere pulled out, and I heard her say to her daughter or her granddaughter as they passed me, “There, I’ve won six louis, and I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.” Also there was this statistic. A friend pointed to a young man with the dead stub of a cigar in his mouth, which he kept munching nervously all the time and pitching hundred-dollar chips on the board while two sweet young girls reached down over his shoulders to deposit modest little gold pieces, and said: “He’s only funning, now; wasting a few hundred to pass the time--waiting for the gold room to open, you know, which won’t be till after midnight--then you’ll see him bet! He won £14,000 there last night. They don’t bet anything there but big money.” The thing I chiefly missed was the haggard people with the intense eye, the hunted look, the desperate mien, candidates for suicide and the pauper’s grave. They are in the description, as a rule, but they were off duty that night. All the gamblers, male and female, old and young, looked abnormally cheerful and prosperous. However, all the nations were there, clothed richly and speaking all the languages. Some of the women were painted, and were evidently shaky as to character. These items tallied with the descriptions well enough. The etiquette of the place was difficult to master. In the brilliant and populous halls and corridors you don’t smoke, and you wear your hat, no matter how many ladies are in the thick throng of drifting humanity, but the moment you cross the sacred threshold and enter the gambling hell, off the hat must come, and everybody lights his cigar and goes to suffocating the ladies.