One man, who was a great winner, evidently thought exceedingly well of his own sagacity of head, and others also, for they were very apt to follow his lead as to stakes, and looked upon him with a sort of temporary and provisional, though purely intellectual respect. But what quite convinced me of the strength of this curious fallacy of the mind, was that when I heard that the youngest of my companions had actually come off a slight winner, having at the last moment retrieved his previous losses by putting his sole remaining two-franc-piece out of a hundred and twenty-five francs he was willing to risk, on the number which represented his age, and gained in consequence thirty-two times his stake, my respect for his shrewdness distinctly rose, and I became sensible of obscure self-reproaches for not having made use of like arbitrary reasons for the selection of the various numbers on which I had staked my money during the period of my own play. It was true that there was no number high enough, sad to say, for that which would have represented my own age, so that I could not have staked on that,—but then, why not have selected numbers whereon to stake that had some real relation to my own life, the day of the month which gave me birth, or the number of the abode in which I work in town? Evidently, in spite of the clearest understanding of the chances of the game, the moral fallacy which attributes luck or ill-luck to something of capacity or gift, or incapacity and deficiency, in the individual player, must be profoundly ingrained in us. I am convinced that the shadow of merit and demerit is thrown by the mind over multitudes of actions which have no more possibility of either wisdom or folly in them than—granted, of course, the folly of gambling at all—the selection of the particular chance on which you win or lose. When you win at one time, and lose at another, the mind is almost unable to realize steadily that there was no reason accessible to yourself _why_ you won and _why_ you lost. And so you invent—what you know perfectly well to be a fiction—the conception of some sort of inward divining rod which guided you right when you used it properly, and failed only because you did not attend adequately to its indications.