On every race-course there was a public gambling booth and an abundance of thimble-riggers' stalls. These, I am happy to state, exist no longer; and the fools who are always ready to be plucked, can only, in gambling, fall victims to the commonest and coarsest of swindlers; skittle sharps, beer-house rogues and sharpers, and knaves who travel to entrap the unwary in railway carriages with loaded dice, marked cards, and little squares of green baize for tables, and against whom the authorities of the railway companies very properly warn their passengers. A notorious gambling house in St James's Street--Crockford's,--where it may be said, without exaggeration, that millions of pounds sterling have been diced away by the fools of fashion, is now one of the most sumptuous and best conducted dining establishments in London--the "Wellington." The semipatrician Hades that were to be found in the purlieus of St James's, such as the "Cocoa Tree," the "Berkeley," and the "stick-shop," at the corner of Albemarle Street--a whole Pandemonium of rosewood and plate-glass dens--never recovered from a razzia made on them simultaneously one night by the police, who were organized on a plan of military tactics, and under the command of Inspector Beresford; and at a concerted signal assailed the portals of the infamous places with sledge-hammers. At the time to which I refer, in Paris, the Palais Royal, and the environs of the Boulevards des Italiens, abounded with magnificent gambling rooms similar to those still in existence in Hombourg, which were regularly licensed by the police, and farmed under the municipality of the Ville de Paris; a handsome per-centage of the iniquitous profits being paid towards the charitable institutions of the French metropolis. There are very many notabilities of the French Imperial Court, who were then _fermiers des jeux_, or gambling house contractors; and only a year or two since Doctor Louis Veron, ex-dealer in quack medicines, ex-manager of the Grand Opera, and ex-proprietor of the "Constitutionnel" newspaper, offered an enormous royalty to Government for the privilege of establishing a gambling house in Paris. But the Emperor Napoleon--all ex-member of Crockford's as he is--sensibly declined the tempting bait. A similarly "generous" offer was made last year to the Belgian Government by a joint-stock company who wanted to establish public gaming tables at the watering-places of Ostend, and who offered to establish an hospital from their profits; but King Leopold, the astute proprietor of Claremont, was as prudent as his Imperial cousin of France, and refused to soil his hands with cogged dice.