A grand saloon that stretches across the house holds two long tables, around which are seated thirty or forty men and women, intent, silent, more statue than life-like. With your eyes closed you would scarcely be conscious that any one was in the room. The clicking of gold and silver on the table, the few words of the manager as he decides a point, an occasional deep-drawn sigh as pent-up emotion finds escape, with now and then an involuntary exclamation, evidently out of order and quite disagreeable to all concerned,—these are the only interruptions to the _solemn_, painful stillness of the Homburg gaming-table. I have heard that something more startling than an oath or a groan sometimes has interrupted the current of the play, and that a gambler, in a paroxysm of rage and despair, has blown out his brains at the table. But such incidents are not of every-day occurrence. Besides, people who play here have not many brains to blow out. They are not insane. But as a class, they are below the average of the human family in intellectual force, because they stake their money with the knowledge that the chances are not _even_, are always against them, and in favor of the bank, or managers of the table. In playing _roulette_, or _rouge et noir_, the two games which are constantly going on, a bystander sees that the _taker_ draws in more than he shoves out, and that the tendency of things is steadily in favor of the bank, while _chance_ favors the victims just often enough to keep up the hope that they will make a grand hit by and by and make up all their losses. Yet the game is so transparently in the hands of the managers, that one wonders any one can be so big a fool as to lose all his money in such hopeless ventures. The bank sets up a certain amount of money every day, as the capital for _that_ day, and stories are told of some heavy gambler now and then breaking the bank, but that means only that by a fortunate run he has cleaned out what was set up for the time, and to-morrow it is all right again with the same or a larger capital. But these stories are mostly fictitious, set afloat by the bank itself, which, by pretending to be _broken_, encourages the idea that it is just as apt to lose money as those who are playing against it.