Part 55

“Here am I, a Victim of Gambling! Take Warning by me, and never Enter this Hell! The Man who Plays Damns his Soul Forever! Don’t Deceive Yourself! Bet Once, and You are Lost! The Doors of this Saloon are the Gates of Death.”

[Sidenote: FAIR WITHOUT, HIDEOUS WITHIN.]

The bathers and water-drinkers, sallying forth early, were shocked to see the unfortunate gentleman suspended by the neck, and to read what he had so truthfully written. The Direction, indignant at what they considered a breach of etiquette, lost no time in removing the corpse, which furnished such a sad commentary on their perfidious entertainment. Before breakfast everybody knew of the tragedy, and it had such an effect upon the patrons of the bank that the tables, for two or three days, were very thinly attended. The Direction felt sorely troubled respecting the unpleasant circumstance, as they termed it, and industriously circulated the report that there was no truth in the story of the Hungarian suicide; that he had really left for Basle the day previous to his reported self-destruction; that the figure found hanging was merely an effigy placed there by some mischievous jesters, against whom legal proceedings would be begun forthwith. Strangely enough, this invention was believed. The players returned in full force, and the warning of the Hungarian was lost, as a thousand other warnings have been lost before.

If the private history of the four gaming places could be learned, with all the evils resulting from them, the record would be ghastly and hideous indeed. It is only now and then that an intimation of the great injury they do comes to the surface; and if any considerable part of it were known, the springs would be avoided like lazar-houses. A stoical pride is generally practised by the habitués who have suffered financially; and I have observed many men, and not a few women, turn away from the tables with a forced smile, when I knew that they were undergoing excruciating torture.

Losing money which one cannot afford to lose brings with it a train of social, mental, and moral ills that cannot be fully estimated. Could a thousandth part of the woes wrought by the demon of chance be depicted on those frescoed and gilded walls, they would equal the torments ascribed by gloomy priests to the doomed and damned in the fiery pit.

The outside of the temples of fortune is dazzlingly attractive; but, passing beyond the portals, and lifting the purple veil, such anguish and agony are apparent as may well appall the stoutest heart.

Some men are so methodical and cool-blooded that they are proof against the seductions of _roulette_ and _rouge-et-noir_. They can make up their mind beforehand as to how much they will lose, and never risk another florin. These, however, are exceptions to human nature, and no ordinary mortal can hope to imitate them with any prospect of success.

[Sidenote: A CALM-BLOODED BANKER.]

A sturdy Dutch banker from Amsterdam is in the habit of visiting one of the spas every season, and always bets within a certain limit. Four thousand florins is the sum he feels able to lose annually, and this being gone, nothing prompts him to risk any more. Sometimes he loses this in a few days, sometimes not for weeks, sometimes not at all. Whatever he may gain does not count, as he feels privileged to do as he chooses with his winnings, but having parted at the tables with four thousand florins less than he had on his arrival, he is bidden in vain to make his game. He told me once that he fancied he was a good deal ahead of the tables, but having made an exact calculation, he found that in ten years all he had won was fifteen florins.

The _croupiers_ are a singular class. Nearly all of them have, some time or other, belonged to the _galerie_, and, as may be imagined from their position, have wrecked themselves on the uncertain sea of hazard.

[Sidenote: ANTECEDENTS OF CROUPIERS.]

The last season I was at Homburg, six of the _croupiers_ there had histories. One of them was the son of a coffee planter of Brazil. He had fallen into some serious trouble in Rio Janeiro, and had gone to Lisbon, where he led such a prodigal life, and drew on his father so frequently, that the old gentleman refused to honor his drafts further. The young scapegrace then went to Italy, served in the Papal army, afterwards became a sailor, travelled all through the Orient, earned considerable money by trading, went back to the Continent, visited Baden, arrayed himself against the tables, was rendered penniless, and in his desperate strait was appointed _croupier_.

A second of this fraternity had been a Malay pirate, it was whispered, and also a monk in Palermo; then a _valet de place_, and finally a brother of the rake.

The third informed me he had been a Greek priest, but, having been suspected of conspiring against the Emperor of Russia, he was sent to Siberia, whence he escaped and entered upon his present calling.

A fourth, a Hebrew, once kept a pawnbroking shop in Chatham Street, and was sentenced to Sing Sing on a charge of forgery, served two years, inherited some money left him by an uncle in Prague, became a victim to play, and at last had the satisfaction of getting on the right side of the table.

The fifth _croupier_, a Frenchman, had emigrated to California in 1849, and, as a member of the sporting fraternity, narrowly escaped hanging by a mob, some years after. Floating from point to point, he stranded at Baden, and will doubtless die there.

The sixth began his career as a reporter on a Berlin journal; served in the Prussian army; studied law, medicine, and theology, but could never practise anything save gambling. “I always lose,” he said to me; “and having no more money to risk, I have the satisfaction now of seeing other persons make as great fools of themselves as I have made myself.”

Hundreds of chapters might be written on the gambling hells of Germany, for the subject is inexhaustible. But each and all of them, if truthful, would show that the spas, like the Dead Sea apples, are attractive to the sight, but ashes and bitterness within. The players are handsome maskers. They laugh, and dance, and seem happy; but when the masks and dominos are removed, the bodies are leprous, their touch contagion, their soft caress a lingering and loathsome death.

LI.

SUBTERRANEAN DWELLINGS.

EARLIEST HABITATIONS.—UNDERGROUND HOUSES.—A DWELLING ON THE AMERICAN PLAINS.—HOW AN EARTH HOUSE IS MADE.—RESULT OF A NIGHT IN IT.—ARCTIC DWELLINGS.—A MANSION IN KAMCHATKA.—ITS ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES.—A CHIMNEY AND DOORWAY IN COMMON.—THE AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE.—A LIVE DOG IN A STEW-KETTLE.—THE STORY OF GAMOOT.—HOW HE ENTERTAINED HIS FRIENDS.—FISH-OIL PUNCH AND A CANDLE BREAKFAST.—HOW HE LEARNED ENGLISH.—NEW MODE OF BOXING THE COMPASS.—GAMOOT’S MELANCHOLY FATE.

The climate of the Garden of Eden was of such a temperature, and the customs of Adam and Eve, before their famous fruit-gathering excursion, were of such a primitive character, that no dwellings were needed. It is not known that the weather ever compelled Adam and Eve to seek shelter, and they had no prying neighbors to disturb them; but, after the abandonment of the garden, it became necessary for them and their followers to have places of shelter. The first habitations were, probably, holes in the ground. The historians generally agree that the primitive habitations of the savage partake more or less of a subterranean character. At the present day there are many tribes of people that live wholly or partially under ground. Dwellings thus made are easy of construction, especially in regions where timber is not abundant, and the facilities for working in stone do not abound.

In the far west, between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, there are many underground, or partly underground, dwellings, inhabited, not by savages, but by white men. Dwellings of this sort are not particularly dry, but they are generally cool, and, if one does not mind a little dampness, they are quite comfortable. My first experience with one of these habitations was not entirely agreeable. I had been travelling for several days, and sleeping at night under the shelter of a wagon. My bed was airy, and the only protection the wagon gave me was to keep away the dew, and prevent wandering mules and oxen from running over me. My health was excellent, and I was beginning to consider a house a superfluity.

We found a party of men living in one of these houses, where there was no wood for a long distance, or but very little of it, and they had dug out a place under ground, covered it with a roof consisting of poles, bushes, and turf, and were making themselves comfortable. They urged me to share their hospitality, and I did so, abandoning my wagon for the shelter of their roof. In the morning I awoke with one of the worst colds I ever had in my life, and for several days I had a very disagreeable and intimate acquaintance with a sore throat.

[Sidenote: A MANSION IN KAMCHATKA.]

In the northern part of America and Asia the dwellings of the aboriginals are constructed partly under ground. A hole is dug in the earth four or five feet deep, and a rude roof of poles and earth is placed over it. The Greenlanders and the Esquimaux generally enter their dwellings by a long passage-way, so low that one must creep on his hands and knees, and it is so narrow that a stranger cannot easily turn round in it. In Kamchatka the natives have a similar dwelling. Some tribes enter their houses at the side by a passage-way, somewhat like the entrance to an Esquimaux dwelling. Other tribes enter through the centre of the roof, going down through a hole which serves for a chimney.

[Sidenote: GOING DOWN A CHIMNEY.]

After an experience of both kinds of entrances, I greatly prefer the Esquimaux’. In North-eastern Siberia it was my fortune to be thrown among the Koraks, a people whose dwellings have only one place to serve as a door and chimney. The fire is directly beneath this hole. It is generally burning in winter with considerable briskness, and almost always has a pot of reindeer meat over it. When you accept the hospitality of a Korak, you descend into this hole by means of a pole with notches in its side, on which you must cling with feet and hands. A blast of hot, blinding smoke rises in your face, and, as you descend, it grows hotter and hotter. By the time you are within two feet of the bottom, you can scarcely breathe. When you think you are nearing the bottom, you must jump from the pole, and you are just as likely to jump into the fire as you are to jump from it. At my first experience I did not jump fairly into the fire, but so close to it that my feet came very near being singed.

Every Korak habitation supports a large number of dogs, which are used for draught purposes. The dogs are not admitted to the private quarters of the family, but are compelled to stay outside. They content themselves with hanging round the hole in the roof, and look down in the inside, sniffing the venison that is below. Occasionally they get to fighting near the hole, and one of them drops through. Sometimes he drops into the fire, and sometimes into the pot of meat, and makes a commotion. He yells a good deal in either case. If he has fallen into the fire, he is taken by the neck and swung up again through the chimney. If he falls into the stew-pot, he is taken out, howling all the while like a congress of chimpanzees, the broth is squeezed out of his shaggy hide, so that it shall not be lost, and then he is thrown up into the open air. The natives do not appear to have any pity for the dog, and the fact that he has been soused in the dinner pot does not in the least affect their appetites. They swallow the stewed venison with just the same relish as they would if it contained no dog’s hairs to thicken the mess and get between their teeth.

[Sidenote: INCONVENIENCES OF ARCTIC NIGHTS.]

In these northern regions the weather is exceedingly cold. On the coast of the Arctic Ocean, far inside the polar circle, the sun frequently forgets itself, and for days and weeks in summer behaves like a masculine chicken, and never sets. In winter it also forgets itself, and not only sets, but stays set for a longer time than the most respectable hen that was ever known. It would be inconvenient to publish a daily newspaper there, for the reason that some of the days are not more than fifteen minutes long, while others are three or four months. And the same is the case with the nights, which are sometimes stretched out to an inconvenient length. They would be jolly for courtships and for evening parties; but it would not be advisable, in the middle of one of the best of those nights, to sing “We won’t go home till morning,” and then fall to drinking hot punches and things every ten minutes, “till daylight doth appear.”

Those long nights are a great delusion to a man who thinks it will be capital sport to lie abed until late in the morning. If he goes to bed with a determination to make a night of it, he finds that he does not sleep straight through, but has to get up a good many times before morning to have his hair dressed, and to get on the outside of that edible conglomerate known as hash. If he should try to get through the night without eating or drinking, the probabilities are that he would furnish a job for a hyperborean undertaker in consequence of early starvation; but it would be equally inconvenient to attempt to stay out of bed all day, as a great many people insist upon doing in this part of the world. A nap would be necessary after breakfast and after dinner, at all events, and I shrewdly suspect that the most of us, if we lived there, would have many breakfasts and dinners between sunrise and sunset.

It would delight John B. Gough or Father Mathew to have an old toper go away up north in summer, and take only one drink a day; and if he took it in the shape of an appetizer before breakfast, it would give him a splendid appetite by the time he sat down to his toast and steak, provided the day was laid out for only one allowance of breakfast, dinner, and supper.

[Sidenote: GAMOOT AT HOME.]

In describing life in this region of ice, and snow, and underground dwellings, I propose to do it by narrating the adventures of a mythical native, whom I will call Gamoot. He owned a brown stone front, about latitude seventy-five degrees north, longitude two hundred and fifty degrees east, where his nearest neighbor was a polar bear, and he looked out of his bay window upon a cheerful scene of icebergs, and all that sort of thing. His brown stone front was made of ice, built over a hole in the ground, and looked like one of the piles of hay that the farmers make in the field, before they drive round with the cart. The front door was a slab of ice, and, when you had rung the bell and sent up your card, you dropped on your hands and knees, and went in. The hall was twenty feet long, and about two feet high and wide; it made a couple of turns, and one of them was a sharp angle, like the corner of a dry goods box. You went inside the house, and had to twist yourself round the corner of the hall, like a big steamboat going up the Red River. You had to work your way along very much as an eel goes through a water-pipe. Gamoot did not ventilate his hall very well, and if you were a new comer, it was quite possible for you to imagine that you had mistaken the entrance, and gone into the sewer instead of the fashionable doorway.

It was inconvenient sometimes, when you were about mid-way of the hall, creeping along ever so nice, and just doubling the sharp corner,—it was inconvenient, I say, to meet one of Gamoot’s big dogs on his way out. Gamoot’s dogs were an independent lot of pups, with appetites like mill-hoppers, and teeth like cross-cut saws. When they made up their minds to go out, they generally went, and if anybody was in the way, it was healthier for him to go ashore than to stay there. Gamoot used to apologize for his dogs, and say that their conduct was owing to their breeding, as they were half wolf and the rest ugliness. I used to wish that they had been of a different breed.

But if you happened to get into Gamoot’s house without being interviewed by his dogs, you were sure to be interviewed by the whole family as soon as you reached the parlor. The _grand salon_ was about twenty feet across, and was high enough to allow Gamoot to lie down, which he did very often. The only way you could stand erect was by sitting down on the floor, and standing in sections. By sitting down you could hold your head and body in a perpendicular position, or by lying on your back you could stick up your feet and legs. The latter position was considered ungraceful, and was not generally practised by visitors. The house was ventilated through the hall, which was always kept closed. The atmosphere was about as thick as an invalid’s gruel, and sometimes it became so tough and hard that visitors used to break off pieces of it to carry away as _souvenirs_. Gamoot had a pan which he used to fill with fish-oil, and then put a wick in it. This pan served as chandelier, furnace, and everything of the sort. Sometimes the children fell into it, but it did not burn them, though they soaked up a frightful lot of grease.

[Sidenote: HYPERBOREAN ETIQUETTE.]

Sometimes, when Gamoot had company that he wanted to get rid of, he used to take a bottle out of doors, and fill it with fresh air. He would then return, and hold it to the nose of each visitor. He would then point to the cheerful hall-way; the two movements were understood to mean that there was more of the same sort outside, and that the visitors had better be sniffing it. The gentle hint was generally understood, and the visitor, after looking to see that the dogs were all inside, and not likely to be met in the hall, politely bade Gamoot adieu, kissed Mrs. Gamoot, the children, and the dogs, and departed.

Gamoot was as hospitable as a Dutch uncle. He used to keep a barrel of fish-oil and a box of candles on draught in one corner of his study and smoking-room. Whenever you called, he would mix you a fish-oil punch; and O, such a punch! It is enough to make one’s mouth oil to think of it! Then he would hand you a candle, just as your Boston entertainer would hand you a cracker; and he not only handed you a candle, but he took one himself. It was a pleasure to see him, with a tin glass of oil punch in one hand and a candle in the other, and as fast as he took a sip at the candle, he took a bite at the punch; and it was not the polite thing to refuse either one or the other. Gamoot used to resent a refusal, and he had a pleasant way of taking you by the back of the neck, and squeezing you till your mouth opened. Then he would drive the candle down your throat with a mallet that he kept for the purpose, and he would pour the punch after it with a funnel. Knowing his playful eccentricities, it was always better to take your punch and candle without making a fuss.

It may be inferred that Gamoot was an uncivilized savage; but he was not. He had met white men who visited the polar regions in pursuit of whales. He had learned from these aristocrats something of the language and customs of civilization. He had no knowledge of sacred history; but, to judge from the style of his speech, he was well versed in profane history. He knew most of the parts of speech in the English language that are addressed to disobedient sailors by their captains and first and second mates; and on one occasion a shipwrecked mariner offered to educate Gamoot in English for his board and lodging. Gamoot accepted, and they went to work.

“I will teach the bloody Injin to box the compass,” said the mariner to himself.

“Come here, blame your eyes!” said the mariner to Gamoot; only he used another word, which I do not exactly recall, in place of “blame.”

[Sidenote: NEW WAY OF BOXING THE COMPASS.]

The mariner had saved a compass, and as Gamoot stood over it, Jack placed his finger on the “points,” and named them over. But instead of giving their names as they are known to nautical sailors, he applied an oath to each of them; and he varied the oaths, so that by the time the compass was boxed, he had uttered a lot of profanity that would make an Arkansas stage-driver break his heart for joy.

Gamoot was a good scholar, and learned his lesson well. He used to repeat it to visitors, and was as proud of it as a poodle dog is of the ribbons in his ears. He always gave great delight to the strangers, especially if they happened to be chaplains of whale-ships, or missionaries on the hunt for converts. To enter his house, take an oil punch and an appetizing candle, and hear his melodious voice box the compass in the way he had been taught, was a delight that few persons ever enjoyed.

[Sidenote: TRAGIC FATE OF GAMOOT.]

But one day, when the bark Susan Maria touched near Gamoot’s mansion for salt, water, and provisions, the hospitable gentleman went to the beach to welcome the crew, and look out for a chance to steal something. By accident he picked up an oar, and was walking off with it, for fear it might be lost. One of the sailors addressed Gamoot in language much like boxing the compass, and the innocent aboriginal supposed the briny navigator was repeating his lesson. The first mate, who had charge of the boat, repeated the address, and added something which implied that the dog-star presided at the birth of Gamoot. This phrase was also familiar to the native, and he paid no attention to it.

The mate then proceeded to give Gamoot a gentle hint, which he did by throwing a harpoon through him. The point of the instrument entered between the brown-skinned gentleman’s shoulders, and came out in front of his heart, after dividing that organ into unequal parts. The boat-steerer then gave an additional hint by throwing a bomb-lance, which exploded in Gamoot’s head, and interfered seriously with future repetitions of his lesson in navigation.

Gamoot subsequently died of his injuries. His romantic career has passed into poesy, and the story of his house, his punches, his candles, his linguistic researches, and his unfortunate harpooning is sung wherever he was known.

LII.

BRIGANDAGE AS A FINE ART.

HIGHWAY ROBBERY IN MODERN TIMES.—THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW CONTRASTED.—HABITS OF RUSSIAN ROBBERS.—PIOUS THIEVES.—PRAYERS FOR SUCCESS.—ROAD AGENTS.—CRUELTIES OF ITALIAN BRIGANDS.—TORTURE AND RANSOM OF PRISONERS.—SPANISH BRIGANDS.—ADVENTURE ON A SPANISH ROAD.—AN AMERICAN PRINCE AND AN ENGLISH DUCHESS.—AN EXCITING RACE.—A DUCHESS IN UNDRESS.

Brigandage is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in most parts of Europe, thanks to the introduction of railways, and the gradual abolition of the mail coach and diligence. In France it occurs so rarely as to cause general comment whenever an instance is reported; and in Prussia and Austria one can travel, with little danger of highway robbery, from one end of the country to the other. Russia, which has few railways, has more cases of brigandage than its western neighbors, though the government always deals very severely with robbers when it catches them. Travellers in the eastern and southern parts of the Muscovite empire frequently encounter robbers on their route, and give up their purses with as good grace as they can muster. There is a law in Russia that forbids one to fire upon robbers, unless they outnumber him three to one; but as a man who is attacked can usually make conscientious oath that he thought his assailants very numerous, he is generally excused for any violation of the statute in such cases made and provided.