Last evening I walked around to about fifty of the gambling tables. A volume could not describe their splendor or their fatal attractions. The halls themselves are vast and magnificent, spread over with tables and implements for gambling. The pictures which decorate them no pen of mine shall describe. The bar-rooms are furnished with the most expensive liquors, no care or attention being spared in the _compounding and coloring_ of them. The music is performed often by professors, and is of the best kind. The tables are sometimes graced, or disgraced, by females, who came at first masked, and who are employed to deal the cards, or who come to play on their own account. “The Bank” consists of a solid pile of silver coin, surmounted by the golden currency of as many countries as there are dupes about the table. Often a sack or two of bullion, which has cost the poor miner months of labor, is placed upon the top of all. Sufficient money to send one home independent changed owners during my short stay. A boy of ten years came to one of the tables with a few dollars. His “run of luck” was surprising, and to him bewildering. In ten minutes he was the owner of a _pile_ of silver, with some gold. In one minute more he was without a dollar. Thinking by one turn of the cards to double his profits, he lost the whole. The instances of great good luck on the part of the players are very rare. But they sometimes occur. A lawyer of this city recently swept three tables in one evening. A young man came from the States in one of the last steamers, and was preparing to go to the mines. He borrowed ten dollars, and went to one of the faro banks. During the night and a part of the next forenoon, he had won $7000, when he made a resolution never to play more, and returned home in the next steamer. Mr. Davidson, the agent of the Rothschilds, says that some of the professed gamblers send home by him to England the average sum of $17,000 a month. Many tricks are resorted to in order to bring persons to the table. An eye-witness assures me that he has seen the president of the bank slip secretly into the hand of some one, employed for the purpose of decoying others, a quantity of coin. On receiving this, he would leave the room, but soon return, and present himself in a noisy manner at the table, and boldly “plank down” the very money he had received. In five minutes the table would be surrounded by eager players.