If it were possible to confine gambling at cards to the professional gamblers, there would be no cause for complaint, but as this is an impossibility, the Police Commissioners should take steps to protect young men who are first innocent victims and afterwards by their experience become villainous cheats. It is a well-known fact that poker is largely played in private houses and at some of the clubs, but with these cases the police are powerless to deal, and it is only public sentiment that will break them up. In some of the hotels, too, rooms are set apart for card-playing, but as the Magistrate has stated that, on a hotelkeeper being convicted of such an offence, he will annul the liquor license, it is safe to conclude that the business is not carried on on a very large scale. The Police Commissioners have it in their power to keep many young men from being decoyed headlong to destruction. Will they exert that power by arresting these “cappers” and unscrupulous night-hawks as vagrants, if they cannot catch them gambling, and give them a term of imprisonment without a fine after the first conviction? In conclusion it may be remarked that gambling is not the only offence of the gambler against public morals. Many of them shun drink, and only indulge in occasional excesses in this direction, but all of them, without exception, are frequenters of immoral houses. When a gambler makes a haul his first impulse is to repair to the bagnio, where he finds creatures who will welcome him when he is flush. The debasing nature of gaming is shown in the one fact that the money won is largely spent in the indulgence of guilty pleasures. CHAPTER IX. THE NIGHT POLICEMAN. “Come along Teraulay street,” said a night policeman the other night to me, “you may as well go that way to the office as any other.” It was after one o’clock in the morning, it was a starless night, our footsteps echoed strangely from the houses, millions of unseen spirits were opening with noiseless fingers the swelling buds of the horse-chestnuts over head, and, in short, the night policeman by my side wanted to chat and thus pass some of the time away. I was not slow in taking advantage of the humor he was in. “I suppose you have some queer experiences patrolling through the ward at night,” I put in as a starter.