All the available guns and ammunition were gotten together and every night the doors were barred securely; for what the revolutionists chiefly needed was money, and should there be an uprising in northeastern Venezuela, the Pitch Lake headquarters would be the first point of attack. It was in charge of Castro sympathizers, there might be large sums of money in the Company’s safe and it was practically unprotected. In the meantime diplomatic relations between our United States and Venezuela had been severed and one morning a United States battleship was discovered lying quietly in the harbor of La Guayra. The numbers of _la Constitucional_—a month old when they reached us—were beginning to talk of war and to boast of the ease with which Venezuela would erase the United States of America from the face of the globe. Bitter things were said about the sister republic in the north. And there we were living on the bone of contention itself. It was about this time that I began to see the advisability of being more than ordinarily civil; and so it happened that I was led into playing cards for the first and only time for money and that on a Sunday! We had been working almost incessantly and I had begun to feel that, even if it was to Mr. Grell that we were indebted for the hospitality, it was not quite nice for us to appear only at “feeding time,” particularly as our long days out of doors gave us such appalling appetites. So on this occasion when I was asked to make a fourth at cards, I saw no way out of it. Moreover, the battleship lay in the harbor of La Guayra, and my countrymen were in sad disfavor in Venezuela. W—— had ignominiously deserted and gone to bed, so there was only one sleepy little woman left to uphold the honor of a great nation! The game was “_Siete y media_,”—“seven and a half.” I forget the rules now. I only remember that they seemed very intricate as explained to me in Spanish. Fortunately for me, the stakes were low, for I steadily lost all the time. “_Grano por grano la gallina come_,” quoted Mr. Lugo,—“grain by grain the hen eats.” Later he remarked how he hated to win from the señorita—but the señorita observed that he hated it much as the famous walrus wept for the oysters while— “... he sorted out Those of the largest size, Holding his pocket-handkerchief Before his streaming eyes.” I was wofully tired and sleepy. I did not at all know the etiquette of gambling! And I thought the loser must not be a “quitter”—even if the extent of her losses was only “_dos reales_,” or twenty-five cents. So I played on until at midnight the game was declared over. It is well that virtue is its own reward, as it has no other, for I was told the next morning by a husband who had had a perfectly good night’s sleep—that I was a very foolish person indeed to sit up playing cards with those men, and that the loser could always stop: it was the winner who must not propose it.