As we drove up to the tavern which the farmstead we sought surrounded, my curious eye was caught by a fluttering windmill contrivance perched upon the gable. It was the figure of a woman done in pine and perhaps four feet of height, carved in the somewhat airy character of a ballet dancer. Instead of a dance, however, the lady contented herself with an exhibition of Indian Club swinging--one in each pine palm; the breeze offering the whirling impulse--in the execution wherof she poised herself with one foot on a wooden ball not unlike the arrowing bronze Diana of Madison Square. This figure, twirling clubs, as a mere windmill would have been amazing enough; but as though this were not sufficiently wondrous, at regular intervals our ballet dancer shifted her feet on the ball, replacing the right with the left and again the left with the right in measured alternation. The miracle of it held me transfixed. The host came fatly to his front stoop and smiled upon my wide-eyed interest. “Where did you get it?” I asked. “That was carved with a jack-knife,” replied mine host, “by a party called ‘Casino Joe.’ It took him’most a year; he got it mounted and goin’ jest before he died.” For long I had lost trace of Casino Joe; it was now at this change house I blundered on the news how my old gambling friend of the Bowery came with his consumption and some eight thousand dollars--enough to end one’s life with--and made this place home until his death. His grave lay across a field in the little rural burying ground where he had played when a boy, for Casino Joe was native of these parts. There were no cheatings or tricky illicitisms hidden in Joe’s supremacies of casino. They were works of a wax-like memory which kept the story of the cards as one makes entries in a ledger. When the last hands were out between Joe and an adversary, a glance at his mental entries of cards already played, and another at his own hand, unerringly informed him of what cards his opponent held. This he called “Telling the last four.” It was as an advantage more than enough to enable Joe to win; and while I lived in his company, I never knew him to be out of pocket by that divertisement. The marvel was that he could keep accurate track of fifty-two cards as they fell one after the other into play, and do these feats of memory in noise-ridden bar-rooms and amid a swirl of conversation in which he more or less bore part.