“I turned gamester, too. It is impossible for you, George, to conceive the immense attraction a gaming-table possesses in that land of gold and silver and jewels. One might almost fancy that one of those fabulous trees we read of in Oriental tales had been shaken over the green cloth! There is little or no regular coined money to be seen on it, but dull yellow ingots, bright golden spangles, fiery diamonds, and milk-white, lustrous pearls are heaped up there pell-mell! All the treasures of earth and ocean seem to be brought together on that table, tumbled and jostled in dazzling confusion! You can stay whole nights by that board—nights that fly like minutes—your eyes fascinated, your brain on fire! Twenty times in twenty-four hours you are raised to the throne of Rothschild—as often precipitated down, down to Job’s dunghill. You become bald, you may become mad, but you feel what life is—you live!” “It is true, it is true!” cried Dupuis in a state of intense excitement; “you are right, Tom, there is no doubt of that. And to think that I have never played at anything but that blackguard whist at a sou the counter! But go on, Tom, go on; you really electrify me!” “Everything has its end,” continued Rouvière, highly flattered by the effect he was producing; “there came a day of sadness and discouragement, and I took passage on board an American whaler bound for the south pole. Yes, my hand has touched the frozen limits of our globe; I have contemplated, with feelings akin to awe, those creatures with human-like faces, the morse, on their pedestals of ice, recumbent and dreamy as the sphinx of Thebes. And in the midst of those silent spaces, so strangely different from all I had hitherto seen, I experienced sensations that seemed to belong to another world. A kind of _posthumous_ illusion of being in another planet took possession of me. Certainly I am much deceived if the days and nights I saw in those regions of ice do not resemble those in our pale satellite. What more shall I tell you, my dear friend? Three years after this I found myself in Rio Janeiro, whence I returned to Europe, after having literally described the whole circumference of our globe with the end of my walkingstick! And thus passed away my youth!” M. Rouvière here threw himself back in his arm-chair, and stroked his beard with a sigh. “Every king living might envy you, Tom!” cried Dupuis. “But tell me more. What have you been doing since then?”