_Advt. in "Guardian"._ The oddness of one's outside is, of course, more apparent. * * * * * ORANGES AND LEMONS. V.--THE GAMESTERS. "It's about time," said Simpson one evening, "that we went to the tables and--er----" (he adjusted his spectacles)--"had a little flutter." We all looked at him in silent admiration. "Oh, Samuel," sighed Myra, "and I promised your aunt that you shouldn't gamble while you were away." "But, my dear Myra, it's the first thing the fellows at the club ask you when you've been to the Riviera--if you've had any luck." "Well, you've had a lot of luck," said Archie. "Several times when you've been standing on the heights and calling attention to the beautiful view below I've said to myself, 'One push, and he's a deader,' but something, some mysterious agency within, has kept me back." "All the fellows at the club----" Simpson is popularly supposed to belong to a Fleet Street Toilet and Hairdressing Club, where for three guineas a year he gets shaved every day, and his hair cut whenever Myra insists. On the many occasions when he authorises a startling story of some well-known statesman with the words: "My dear old chap, I know it for a fact. I heard it at the club to-day from a friend of his," then we know that once again the barber's assistant has been gossiping over the lather. "Do think, Samuel," I interrupted, "how much more splendid if you could be the only man who had seen Monte Carlo without going inside the rooms. And then when the hairdress--when your friends at the club ask if you've had any luck at the tables you just say coldly, 'What tables?'" "Preferably in Latin," said Archie. "_Quae mensae?_" But it was obviously no good arguing with him. Besides, we were all keen enough to go. "We needn't lose," said Myra. "We might win." "Good idea," said Thomas. He lit his pipe and added, "Simpson was telling me about his system last night. At least, he was just beginning when I went to sleep." He applied another match to his pipe and went on, as if the idea had suddenly struck him, "Perhaps it was only his internal system he meant. I didn't wait." "Samuel, you _are_ quite well inside, aren't you?" "Quite, Myra. But I _have_ invented a sort of system for _roulette_, which we might----" "There's only one system which is any good," pronounced Archie. "It's the system by which, when you've lost all your own money, you turn to the man next to you and say, 'Lend me a louis, dear old chap, till Christmas; I've forgotten my purse.'" "No systems," said Dahlia. "Let's make a collection and put it all on one number and hope it will win." Dahlia had obviously been reading novels about people who break the bank.