'The first visit of the British youth to the Kursaal is usually paid with fear and trembling. He is with difficulty persuaded to enter the accursed place. When introduced to the saloons--delusively called _de conversation_, he begins by staring fixedly at the chandeliers, the ormolu clocks, and the rich draperies, and resolutely averts his eyes from the serried ranks of punters or players, and the Pactolus, whose sands are circulating on the green cloth on the table. Then he thinks there is no very great harm in looking on, and so peeps over the shoulder of a moustached gamester, who perhaps whispers to him in the interval between two coups, that if a man will only play carefully, and be content with moderate gains, he may win sufficient--taking the good days and the evil days in a lump--to keep him in a decent kind of affluence all the year round. Indeed, I once knew a croupier--we used to call him Napoleon, from the way he took snuff from his waistcoat pocket, who was in the way of expressing a grave conviction that it was possible to make a capital living at Roulette, so long as you stuck to the colours, and avoided the Scylla of the numbers and the Charybdis of the Zero. By degrees, then, the shyness of the neophyte wears off. Perhaps in the course of his descent of Avernus, a revulsion of feeling takes place, and, horror-struck and ashamed, he rushes out of the Kursaal, determined to enter its portals no more. Then he temporizes; remembers that there is a capital reading-room, provided with all the newspapers and periodicals of civilized Europe, attached to the Kursaalian premises. There can be no harm, he thinks, in glancing over "Galignani" or the "Charivari," although under the same roof as the abhorred _Trente et Quarante;_ but, alas! he finds _Galignani_ engaged by an acrid old lady of morose countenance, who has lost all her money by lunch-time, and is determined to "take it out in reading," and the _Charivari_ slightly clenched in one hand by the deaf old gentleman with the dingy ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and the curly brown wig pushed up over one ear, who always goes to sleep on the soft and luxurious velvet couches of the Kursaal reading-room, from eleven till three, every day, Sundays not excepted. The disappointed student of home or foreign news wanders back to one of the apartments where play is going, on. In fact, he does not know what to do with himself until table-d'hote time. You know what the moral bard, Dr Watts says:-- "Satan finds some mischief still, For idle hands to do."