“Such is the experience which I carried away with me from amidst the objectionable smells, the unsavoury company, the malignant gnats, the haggard revelry, and the general moral squalor of Saxon-les-Bains; and when my wife reproached me, with triumphant references to her own warnings, for the missing five pounds, I replied, what I really feel,—though I know I shall never convince her of it,—that my experience was not dearly bought. Is it the only case in which the fiction that we ourselves have _earned_—whether good or evil fortune—forces itself with absurd tenacity upon us? Luther himself could hardly have desired a better proof than this of the pranks which the imagination plays us when dealing with that sense of merit and demerit, so closely bound up with our human egotism. We give ourselves credit, and get credit, I suspect, for a vast deal more both of wisdom and folly in life than we deserve. Are nine-tenths of the prizes and the blanks of life at all more ascribable to any fine selective purpose or deficiency thereof in him who draws them, than my losses, or my friend the Cantab’s sudden retrieval of his loss? Yet I still look upon that able and thoughtful youth with a deep sense of respect for his cleverness in retrieving his losses, and on myself with a melancholy consciousness that, like ‘Traddles’ in ‘David Copperfield,’ my native awkwardness of mind must have been the cause of my very moderate reverses.—I am, Sir, &c., “AN INSTRUCTED GAMBLER.”[26] [Sidenote: THE MISFORTUNE OF EARLY GAINS.] The greatest misfortune that can happen to the haphazard speculator is for him to make money the first two or three “accounts.” He will, in such a case, in the first place believe himself to possess some uncommon luck, or a shrewdness for selecting a security that was about to move in the direction he had reckoned upon. The operations of the most stupid speculator are frequently attended with such results, just as they might also be on his first essay at pitch-and-toss. Such incipient luck, by drawing forth the commendations of others, especially of the brokers—who do not generally err on the side of warning the individual against the dangers which beset such a path—builds up in him a false estimate of his powers. Early success associates his mind with the gains and not with the losses, and the latter are incurred subsequently with a light heart, as a sort of accident that will be sponged out by the results of the next throw.