not too liio;li. But what are hio^h stakes ? In a company of spinsters, in the drawing-room of a secondclass Connecticut boarding-house, five cents 'antemight be deemed extravagant, while in the south, during the glorious days of slavery, a negro ante and twenty on the call was deemed moderate playing. All the?e distinctions are without a difference; and men and women miserably fail in thus trying to befool themselves into making certain phases of gambling respectable while holding other phases of it, equally honest and fair, as illegal and disreputable. On a par with the rest are the English ethics which makes it right to swindle your tailor, but very wrong not to pay a gambling debt. Debts of honor, these last are called.
Of course there are always a thousand excuses ready for whatever folly or iniquity society chooses to indulge in. Gambling in stocks encourages mining ; gambling at the races promotes horse-breeding; gambling in churches helps to buy an organ or pay a debt. But have we no excuses for our honest bankino; g^ames ? Listen to Lecky, the foremost of English moralists: " Even the gambling table fosters among its more skillful votaries a kind of moral nerve, a capacity for bearing losses with calmness, and controlling the force of desires, which is scarcely exhibited in equal perfection in any other sphere." Likewise the immaculate Boswell, whose name, however, is scarcely worthy of mention in connection with the other: "There is a composure and gravity in draughts which insensibly tranquillizes the mind, and accordingly the Dutch are fond of it, as they are of smoking, of the sedative influence of which, though he himself never smoked, he had a high opinion. Besides, there is in draughts some exercise of the faculties."
Dishonest gamblers sometimes mark their cards with puncture's so minute as to be imperceptible to the ordinary touch, and to detect them themselves they are obliged to apply acid to the fingers to increase
