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," exclaims 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
