Polish dancer with a score of titles, the English "milord." But the bulk of the players have the look and air of people who have made their money in trade. It is well to look on at such a scene, if only to strip off the romance which has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter of fact nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, nothing more utterly devoid of interest, than a gambling-table. But as a question of profit the establishment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older piracy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of Genoa, the galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less gold to its harbour than these two little groups of the fools of half a continent. SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE. IV. THE WINTER RETREAT. It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter refuge to look back at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The flinging off of wraps and furs, the discarding of greatcoats, is like the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pass in this sharp, abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of the other that we get some notion of the way in which the actual range and freedom of life is cramped by the "chill north-easters" in which Mr. Kingsley revelled. The unchanged vegetation, the background of dark olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging over the garden wall, are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for violets along the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its English meaning in spots where snow falls once or twice in a year and vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is like a laughing defiance of established facts to lounge by the seashore in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. And with this new sense of liberty comes little by little a freedom from the overpowering dread of chills and colds and coughs which only invalids can appreciate. It is an indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The "lounging" which becomes one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of Naples is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life.