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The Gaming Table by Andrew Steinmetz

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Gambling at the german bathing-places

CHAPTER VIII. page 32

`I have heard of one gentleman, indeed, who, after a ruinous
loss, put a pistol to his head, and discharging it, spattered his
brains over the Roulette wheel. It was said that the banker,
looking up calmly, called out--`_Triple Zero,' `Treble
Nothing_,'--a case as yet unheard of in the tactics of Roulette,
but signifying annihilation,--and that, a cloth being thrown over
the ensanguined wheel, the bank of that particular table was
declared to be closed for the day. Very probably the whole story
is but a newspaper _canard_, devised by the proprietors of some
rival gaming establishment, who would have been delighted to see
the fashionable Hombourg under a cloud.

`When people want to commit suicide at Hombourg, they do it
genteelly; early in the morning, or late at night, in the
solitude of their own apartments at the hotels. It would be
reckoned a gross breach of good manners to scandalize the refined
and liberal administration of the Kursaal by undisguised _felo-
de-se_. The devil on two _croupes_ at Hombourg is the very
genteelest of demons imaginable. He ties his tail up with
cherry-coloured ribbon, and conceals his cloven foot in a patent-
leather boot. All this gentility and varnish, and elegant
veneering of the sulphurous pit, takes away from him, if it does
not wholly extinguish, the honour and loathing for a common
gaming-house, with which the mind of a wellured English
youth has been sedulously imbued by his parents and guardians.
He has very probably witnessed the performance of the
"Gamester" at the theatre, and been a spectator of the
remorseful agonies of Mr Beverly, the virtuous sorrows of
Mrs B., and the dark villanies of Messieurs Dawson and Bates.

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