The unfledged gamester watches the play more narrowly. A stout lady in a maroon velvet mantle, and a man with a bald head, a black patch on his occiput, and gold spectacles, obligingly makes way for him. He finds himself pressed against the very edge of the table. Perhaps a chair--one of those delightfully comfortable Kursaal chairs--is vacant. He is tired with doing nothing, and sinks into the emolliently-cushioned _fauteuil_. He fancies that he has caught the eye of the banker, or one of the gentlemen of the _croupe_, and that they are meekly inviting him to try his luck. "Well, there can't be much harm in risking a florin," he murmurs. He stakes his silver-piece on a number or a colour. He wins, we will say, twice or thrice. Perhaps he quadruples his stake, nay, perchance, hits on the lucky number. It turns up, and he receives thirty-five times the amount of his _mise_. Thenceforth it is all over with that ingenuous British youth. The Demon of Play has him for his own, and he may go on playing and playing until he has lost every florin of his own, or as many of those belonging to other people as he can beg or borrow. Far more fortunate for him would it be in the long run, if he met in the outset with a good swinging loss. The burnt child _DOES_ dread the fire as a rule; but there is this capricious, almost preternatural, feature of the physiology of gaming, that the young and inexperienced generally win in the first instance. They are drawn on and on, and in and in. They begin to lose, and continue to lose, and by the time they have cut their wise teeth they have neither sou nor silver to make their dearly-bought wisdom available. 'At least one-half of the company may be assumed to be arrant rascals--rascals male and rascals female--_chevaliers d'industrie_, the offscourings of all the shut-up gambling-houses in Europe, demireps and _lorettes_, single and married women innumerable.' In the course of the three visits he has paid to Hombourg, Mr Sala has observed that 'nine-tenths of the English visitors to the Kursaal, play;' and he does not hesitate to say that the moths who flutter round the garish lamps at the Kursaal Van der Hohe, and its kindred Hades, almost invariably singe their wings; and that the chaseer at _Roulette_ and _Rouge_, generally turn out edged tools, with which those incautious enough to play with them are apt to cut their fingers, sometimes very dangerously. The season of 1869 in Hombourg is thus depicted in a high class newspaper.