The Story of a Game.
From the French of Albert Delpit.
[Albert Delpit, who was born in 1849, is an American transformed into a Frenchman. His father, a rich tobacco merchant in New Orleans, sent him when a boy to the college of St. Barbe at Paris. His education finished, he was recalled to the United States, to learn his father's business; but a few months were sufficient to convince him that literature had more attractions for him than tobacco. He returned to Paris, where he began to write with much success for various newspapers and magazines. During the Franco-Prussian War, he, like so many other famous men of letters, fought with glory, and was rewarded with the rosette of the Legion of Honour. His poems, plays, and especially his novels, are well known. Short stories he does not greatly cultivate; but the following is an excellent example of his style.]
I.
E were speaking in a club in Paris of the card-sharper who had just been executed, and each was relating his story: our friend Captain I——— alone said nothing.
"Are you going to be the only one who does not furnish his share ?" I asked him.
"Do you really wish it?"
"Certainly!"
"Very well, then. However, I warn you that my story is not in the least like yours, and that my thief is very interesting."
"So much the better! We are listening, my dear fellow."
The Captain lit a cigarette and leaned against the mantelpiece of the salon. We drew up our chairs so as to hear better, with that curious avidity of men, who are, after all, only big children. Outside, a gay May sun was shining through the half-closed shutters.
"The Captain leaned against the mantelpiece."
II.
"Six years ago," said the Captain, "I was commanding a garrison at a wearisome little town in a wearisome little department. Not a distraction; never a theatre; scarcely an atrocious café concert.
"One day, my work being ended, I did not know what to do, and little by little I
