“society” gambled openly and constantly; and we like to fancy that we are all very good and spotless now-a-days and free from the desire for unnatural excitement.  Well, I grant that most European societies in the last century were sufficiently hideous in many respects.  The English aristocrat, male or female, cared only for cards, and no noble lady dreamed of remaining long in an assembly where piquet and ecarte were not going on.  The French seigneur gambled away an estate in an evening; the Russian landowner staked a hundred serfs and their lives and fortunes on the turn of a card; little German princelings would play quite cheerfully for regiments of soldiers.  The pictures which we are gradually getting from memoirs and letters are almost too grotesque for belief, and there is some little excuse for the hearty optimists who look back with complacency on the past, and thank their stars that they have escaped from the domain of evil.  For my own part, when I see the mode of life now generally followed by most of our European aristocracies, I am quite ready to be grateful for a beneficent change, and I have again and again made light of the wailings of persons who persist in chattering about the good old times.  But I am talking now about the spirit of the gambler; and I cannot say that the human propensity to gamble has in any way died out.  Its manifestations may in some respects be more decorous than they used to be; but the deep, masterful, subtle tendency is there, and its force is by no means diminished by the advance of a complicated civilisation.  Often and often I have mused quietly amid scenes where gamblers of various sorts were disporting themselves—­in village inns where solemn yokels played shove-halfpenny with statesmanlike gravity; in sunny Italian streets where lazy loungers played their queer guessing game with beans; in noisy racing-clubs where the tape clicks all day long; on crowded steamboats when Tynesiders and Cockneys yelled and cursed and shouted their offers as the slim skiffs stole over the water and the straining athletes bent to their work; on Atlantic liners when hundreds of pounds depended on the result of the day’s run; on the breezy heath where half a million gazers watched as the sleek Derby horses thundered round.  As I have gazed on these spectacles, I have been forced to let the mind wander into regions far away from the chatter of the gamesters.  Again and again I have been compelled to think with a kind of melancholy over the fact that man is not content until he is taken out of himself.  Our wondrous bodies, our miraculous power of looking before and after, our infinite capacities for enjoyment, are not enough for us, and the poor feeble human creature spends a great part of his life in trying to forget that he is himself.  At the best, our days pass as in the dim swiftness of a dream.  The young man suddenly thinks, “It is but yesterday that I was a child;” the middle-aged man finds the gray hairs streaking his head before