“Performances!” he replied. “Never! or rather, I give them after my own fashion; I will explain that to you presently, but I will first amuse you by telling you how I manage to get a handsome prize for the lessons I give my amateurs; after that I will return to my _performances_. “You can suppose, for reasons easy to understand that I only give lessons to young men whose pockets I presume are well lined. On beginning my explanations I tell my pupil that I leave my price to him, and during the lesson I perform an interlude which must heighten his generosity. “Drawing near my pigeon--pray pardon the word--“ “I have already done so.” “Ah, very good; I beg your pardon. I say, taking one of his buttons in my hand, ‘Here is a mould piercing the cloth, and you might lose it.’ “At the same time I throw a Louis on the table; then I examine his buttons, one after the other, and pretend to draw a gold piece from each. As I only perform this trick as a harmless pleasantry, I pick up my gold with the greatest indifference. I even push my indifference so far as to leave one or two by mistake on the table, but only for a short time, of course. “I continue my lesson, and, as I expected, my pupil pays but slight attention to it, being fully engaged with the reflections I have so skillfully suggested. Can he offer five francs to a man who appears to have his pocket full of gold? Of course not; the least he can do is to add one more piece to those I had displayed, and that always happens. “Like a modern Bias, then, I carry all my fortune about me; I am sometimes tolerably rich, and then my pockets are well lined. Often enough, too, I am reduced to a dozen of these ‘yellow boys,’ but them I never touch, as they are the instruments by which I procure others. Many times I have gone without my dinner, though having this small fortune in my pocket, because I laid it down as a rule not to break into it.” “The performances you give in society,” I said to my narrator, in order to bring him back to that point, “are of course more lucrative?” “They are so, but prudence prevents me giving them so often as I should like.” “I do not understand you.” “I will explain my meaning. When I am in society I am a young man of good family, and, like all young men, play. The only difference is, I have my own way of playing, which is not that of all the world, but it seems it is not bad, because it often renders chances favorable. You shall judge.” Here my narrator stopped to refresh himself, then, as if doing the most legal or harmless thing in the world, he showed me several tricks, or rather acts of swindling, which he executed with so much grace, skill, and simplicity, that it would be impossible to detect him.