I had been made acquainted with its scheme and with some of its cruder virtues by a certain illustrious soldier whom I was once much thrown with.  He confessed to me that he played it before a battle to inspire him with coolness, and after a battle to learn wise behavior under victory or defeat, as it might have been.

I was persuaded to learn more of it.  I played the thing at first, to be sure, as I have noticed that novices always do, with a mind so bent upon “getting it” that I was insensible of its curative and refining agencies.

“You haven’t the secret yet,” said my mentor, who watched me as I won for the first time, and was moved to warn me by my unconcealed pride in this achievement.  “After you’ve played it a few years, you’ll learn that the value of it lies chiefly in losing.  You’ll try like the devil to win, of course, but you’ll learn not to wish for it.  To win is nothing but an endless piling up of the right cards, beginning with the ace and ending with the king, and it only means more shuffling for next time.  But every time you lose you will learn things about everything.”

It was even as he said,—­it took me years to learn this true merit of the game; and still, as he had said, I learned much from it of life.

There is a fine moment at the last shuffling of the cards, a moment when free will and fatalism are indistinguishably merged.

I am ready to lay down eight cards in a horizontal row off my double deck.  Who will say that the precise number of shuffles I have given to it was preordained?

“I do,” exclaimed an obliging fatalist.  “The sequence of every one of those cards was determined when we were yet star-dust.”

I bring confusion to him by performing half a dozen other shuffles.  I am thus far the master of my unborn game—­another last shuffle to prove it, though I shuffle clumsily enough.

I glance disdainfully at the fatalist whom I have refuted, and prepare again to lay down the first row of cards.  But the fellow comes back with, “Those last shuffles were also determined, as was this challenge—­”

“Very well!” and I prepare for still another rearrangement.  But here I reflect that this could be endless and not at all interesting.

I dismiss the fatalist as a quibbler and play on.  Now there is no dispute, unless there be other quibblers.  Fixed is the order in which the cards shall fall, eight at a time.  There is pure fatalism.  But in the movings after each eight are dealt, I shall consciously choose and judge, which is pure free will—­or an imitation of it sufficiently colorable to satisfy any, but quibblers.  There, for me, is the fatalism of body, the free will of soul.  Of these I learn when I play the game.