It has been already hinted that the young man was a gambler, and it is likely that most of the reasons which made the money seem so welcome to him had their sources at the gaming table. He belonged to one of those clubs which deserve to be numbered among the blessings of modern society--where men do not meet for social intercourse and good-fellowship, or for dining purposes, or for any of the common and amiable reasons which draw men into club-life, but simply and purely to the end that they may win one another’s money. It was a joint-stock swindling company to which young Mr. Barter belonged, and within its limits every man proposed to himself to get the better of every other man by such means as lay in his power. A pigeon got in amongst them every now and then, of course--came in well-feathered and went out plucked, but for the main part the rooks pecked hungrily at one another, and made but little of their time and pains. The one solitary advantage of these corporations is that they gather the depredatory birds together, and lead them to prey upon themselves instead of wandering abroad for the defeathering of the innocent and artless who abound even in these days. The well-constituted mind can hardly fail to take pleasure in the contemplation of these resorts, where Greek meets Greek (in the modern French sense as well as the old heroic)--where scoundrel encounters scoundrel, and learns that the pleasure of being cheated is by no means so great as that of cheating. There were people of widely ranging social position in this curious contingent. One or two men of title, and one or two of the highest social or commercial respectability, lent their names for some inconceivable reason to grace the front page of the neatly-bound little volume of rules which govern, or sometimes fail to govern, the conduct of the corporation. Mr. Barter rubbed shoulders with young men--very young men they were--who would one day have handles to their names, and enjoy the control of considerable estates. He sat at the same table with men whose birth and antecedents, like those of the immortal Jeames, were shrouded in a mystery. He met men of his own position, who like himself were desperately glad of being numbered in the same club society with men eminent on the turf, or familiar in the gilded saloons of the great. He liked to think of those gilded saloons; it might be interesting to know what he thought they resembled--most probably a somewhat old-fashioned earthly paradise of ormolu. He bragged indefatigably of his club and the people whom he met there. He dated all his private correspondence from it, and spent hundreds of daylight hours above the ivories and the pasteboard.