but pounds to the Royal Humane Society, and to the doctor, for all the trouble and plague he had given him, a plain gold ring. “Thus lived and died,” writes his biographer, “unpitied and unlamented, in the eighty-sixth year of his age, and possessed of a property of £127,205 Three per Cent. Consolidated Bank Annuities, a man whose life was chequered with as few good actions as ever fell to the share of any person that has lived to an advanced age.” It is not often that money is made by gambling; yet now and then this is the case. General Scott, the father-in-law of George Canning and the Duke of Portland, was known to have won at White’s £200,000, thanks to his notorious sobriety and knowledge of the game of whist. The general possessed a great advantage over his companions by avoiding those indulgences at the table which used to muddle other men’s brains. He confined himself to dining off a boiled chicken, with toast-and-water. By such a regimen he came to the whist-table with a clear head, and possessing, as he did, a remarkable memory, with great coolness of judgment, he was enabled honestly to win the sum of £200,000. If the general was not an eccentric money-getter, he evidently got his money in an eccentric way. Equally successful was the millionaire Crockford, who was originally a fishmonger, keeping a shop near Temple Bar. His fortune was all made at his gambling-house in fifteen or sixteen years. A vast sum, perhaps half a million, was sometimes due to him; but as he won all his debtors were able to raise, and gave credit, it was hard for men of fashion, fond of play, to keep out of his lures. He retired in 1840, much as an Indian chief retires from a hunting country when there is not game enough left for his tribe; and the club, which bore his name, tottered to its fall. It really seems that at that time there were no more very high players visiting the place. It was said that there were persons of rank and station who had never paid their debts to Crockford up to 1844.