The bookmaker smiled a most self-contented smile. He certainly had the air of being in the very best of spirits. He was one of those over-fed, full-faced, knowing-eyed creatures who lurk round racecourses with a flower in their buttonholes, smoke the finest cigars, drink Heidsieck’s Dry Monopole, and drop their H’s over the grand stand with surprising unanimity. But his aspect just then was even more prosperous than usual. He seized Signor Francesco’s arm with good-humoured effusiveness. “Flush!” he cried, with a bounce. “Well, my boy, I should rather think so. Wy, I ain’t on the turf any longer, that’s jest w’ere it is. I’ve retired from business. Jest you look ’ere, Frenchy; that’s gold, that is; I’ve been over in your country for six weeks, I ’ave; and danged if I ain’t come back with my pockets ’arf bust with furrineerin’ money!” “To _my_ country! To Tyrol?” Franz put in, greatly astonished. “Zer ain’t moch money going zere, I fancy. We’re as poor as ze church mice. But, perhaps,” he added, with an afterthought, “you mean Vienna.” “Vienna be ’anged!” the bookmaker responded, with a hearty slap on the Frenchy’s back. To him, as to all his kind, the Continent was the Continent, one and indivisible. He made and encouraged no petty distinctions between France and Austria. “Vienna be ’anged. It’s Monty Carlo _I’ve_ been to. By George, sir, that’s the place to rake the looees in! You puts down your cash on red or black or numbers, or _ong cheval_ they calls it; wh’rr, wh’rr, goes the roolett—pop, out jumps the pea—‘_Rooge gang!_’ sez the croopyer;—and you hauls in your money! I tell you, Frenchy, that’s the place to make your pile in! Wy, I haven’t been there more ’n jest six weeks—an’ I come back last night with a cool twenty thou’ in my britches pocket!” “Twenty sousand francs?” Franz cried, fairly dazzled. His companion’s eyes gazed unutterable contempt “Twenty thousand francs! Francs be blowed!” he answered, briskly. “None o’ your furrineerin’ reckonin’s for me, _if_ you please, young man! I’m a true-born Briton, and I count in pounds sterlin’. No, no; twenty thousand pounds in good French bank-notes—a cool twenty thousand in my britches pocket. I’ve carried ’em home myself, all the way from Monty Carlo, for fear of bein’ robbed—there’s a lot o’ shady people down there on the Literal—and I’m going down now to my banker’s in the Strand, with the twenty thousand pound, to pay ’em in and invest ’em!” “And you earned all zat lot in six weeks!” Franz cried, his mouth watering. “Well, I didn’t exactly _earn_ it, old chap,” the bookmaker replied, with a knowing wink; “though I’ve got a System. I just let it flow in, without doing anything pertickler myself to ’elp it, excep’ it might be to rake in the rhino. But I mean to retire now, and do the toff in future, just runnin’ down there again every two or three years, when I feel the shoe pinch, to replenish the exchequer.”