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More "Gambler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the market," Howard answered, and his air implied that a lack of knowledge of Mr. Brent was ignorance indeed; "a daring gambler. He cornered cotton once, and raked in over a million. He's a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the Finance Minister of the time was a man to whom, in years gone by, Mr. Gould had, unfortunately, declined to grant some small pecuniary assistance, basing his refusal on the ground that the applicant was a notorious gambler and cheat, besides being more than half suspected of a robbery with violence on a wealthy ranchero in a remote country district, where he was actually exercising the function of a judge. Now, after reaching his ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... idea when they cooked it up amongst 'em that she was to come with us. But I SWEAR I don't know how to go about it. I can't seem to make up my mouth to speak to folks first; and then you can't tell whether a man ain't a gambler, or on for the horse-races anyway. So we've been here a week now, and you're the first ones we've spoken to besides ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The woman who was paraded as a victim of violence was of bad character; her husband was a drunkard and a gambler. ...
— Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All Its Phases • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... making no attempt at conversation. Soft music bubbled up around them. He thought about his brother. So Steve was a gambler! And doing poorly at it, Hawkes said. He wondered if Steve would want to go back on the ship. He wondered also how it would be if Steve did agree to ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... prominence to an interview with a "distinguished citizen of Colorado," who gave a highly unfavorable account of the workings of woman suffrage there. The "distinguished citizen" in question was a prize-fighter who had killed three men—a gambler driven out by woman suffrage; and he naturally said that woman suffrage was a failure.... The great Woman's Club of Denver is a power for good in the city; it is carrying on schools in "the bottoms," night schools, kitchen gardens, traveling libraries; it secured ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... that Sam had been an inveterate gambler—that he had won a great deal of money from the soldiers, particularly one, who had that very day threatened to kill him, accusing the Chinaman of having cheated. The soldier probably had no intention of doing anything of the kind, but said it ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... was suggested by my having frequently heard Fitzgerald mentioned as a noted gambler, and sometimes even as a blackleg. O'Connor seemed, I thought, slightly ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... because no Judge would admit as evidence something you declared you had been told. Besides, I'll own that it's an unlikely tale. I was not at or near the factory that night, but I had done some business with Fred Hulton. The lad was a gambler and I'd lent him money; as a matter of fact, I never got it all back. However, a man who now and then acted as my agent learned something about the customs of the factory and went there the night he met Featherstone. But he did ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... company. I would by no means recommend playing at cards as a part of your study, lest you should grow too fond of it, and the consequences prove bad. It were better not to know a diamond from a club, than to become a gambler; but, as custom has introduced innocent card playing at most friendly meetings, it marks the gentleman to handle them genteelly, and play them well; and as I hope you will play only for small sums, should you lose your ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... regret in a drunkard; a gambler, a man who beats you, and a black-leg, who will one day ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... a family distinguished at the bar, Bigot, prior to coming to Canada had occupied the high post of Intendant in Louisiana. In stature, he was small—but well formed;—active—full of pluck— fond of display and pleasure—an inveterate gambler. Had he confined his operations merely to trading, his commercial ventures would have excited little blame, trading having been a practice indulged in by several other high colonial officials. His salary was totally inadequate to the importance ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the leadership to Nick Undrell, a man of blemished reputation, a drunkard, a desperate gambler, and a convicted thief, but a magnificent horseman, a capable scout, and the hero ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... of his income. His secret, well guarded as it was, need be no secret to the reader. Mr. White, who had never touched a playing-card in his life and who grew apoplectic at the sin and shame of playing the races, was an inveterate gambler. His passion was for Sunken Treasure Syndicates, formed to recover golden ingots from ships of the Spanish Armada; for companies that set forth to harness the horse-power of the sea to the services of commerce; for optimistic ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... Spencer Stark, late Captain in His Majesty's Black Hussars, gambler, penniless, always well dressed, and always well fed—Terrible. Just as beetles are beetles, whether dressed in tropical splendour or the funereal black of the English type, so are detrimentals detrimentals. Jones ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... got it out of my wife that the rest was owing to different friends for bridge and racing debts. Of course I had forgotten that my little Irish wife was a born horse-lover, and, I'm sorry to say, gambler; and I ought not to have been surprised. But I was. And I'm afraid I was a bit brutal. You see I couldn't help thinking it was rather hard that the money I'd worked for was to be squandered; and I spoke rather sharply ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... explains, for example, the fact that he was the first gambler on a large scale in modern times. Pictures of future wealth and enjoyment rose in such lifelike colors before his eyes, that he was ready to hazard everything to reach them. The Mohammedan nations would doubtless have anticipated him in this respect, had ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... mail coach to obtain money for her if he has not sufficient for her whims. He will commit a crime if so he may be great and noble in the eyes of some woman or of his special public; such is the nature of the man. Such a lover is like a gambler who would be dishonored in his own eyes if he did not repay the sum he borrowed from a waiter in a gaming house; but will shrink from no crime, will leave his wife and children without a penny, and rob and murder, if so ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... was no gambler,—your immensely wealthy man rarely is,—but it gave him pleasure to watch the primitive emotions which gambling generally brings to the human surface, and so he spent at what he called "The Wash" a good ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... will lead you to strain a power which none but weak men fear; yours has been boundless from the day I knew you first. My love is the only accomplice in my disaster. I have felt, as my ruin progressed, the delirious joys of a gambler; as the money diminished, so my enjoyment grew. Each fragment of my fortune turned into some little pleasure for you gave me untold happiness. I could have wished that you had more caprices that I might gratify them all. I knew ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... there are men who have come there to escape restraint. Cutter was one of the "fast set" of Black Hawk business men. He was an inveterate gambler, though a poor loser. When we saw a light burning in his office late at night, we knew that a game of poker was going on. Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than sherry, and he said he got his start in life by saving the money that other young men spent for ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... of the interruption; and, when he gave the boy twopence and bade him begone, half hoped that he would insist on remaining. But though an obdurate boy on most occasions, he proved complaisant on this, and withdrew to the high road, where he made over one of his pennies to a phantom gambler, and tossed with him until recalled from his dual state by the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... certainty that eagles are gathered together at the place of slaughter. By this the author takes a great advantage for the management of his story, particularly in its darker and more melancholy passages. The impostor, the gambler, all who live loose upon the skirts of society, or, like vermin, thrive by its corruptions, are to be found at such retreats, when they easily, and as a matter of course, mingle with those dupes, who ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... "what would become of the 'Three Tuns?'" (for I wished to give him a lesson). "If your Ma, who took you every Sunday to meeting, should know that her boy was paying attention to married women;—if Drench, Glauber and Co., your employers, were to know that their confidential agent was a gambler, and unfit to be trusted with their money, how long do you think your connection would last with them, and who ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Knust is different. It is called "A Journey of Our Saviour on Earth," and is, in substance, as follows: A father whose son is a gambler, makes him become a soldier. The son deserts during a stormy night and takes refuge in an inn. There he meets a man who seems acquainted with his whole life and whose name is Salvatore (Saviour). He knows that ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... conscious that his eyes were on her, and also that in them lurked an expression of keen interest. His freckled mask of a face gave no clue to his thoughts; it never did, so far as she had ever observed. Fyfe had a gambler's immobility of countenance. He chucked the butt of his cigar in the stove and sat with hands clasped over one knee for some time after Katy John appeared and began setting the dining room table with a ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Berry, the partner of Lincoln, was the son of a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. John Berry, who lived on Rock Creek, five miles from New Salem. The son had strayed from the footsteps of the father, for he was a hard drinker, a gambler, a fighter, and "a very wicked young man." Lincoln cannot in truth be said to have chosen such a partner, but rather to have accepted him from the force of circumstances. It required only a little time to make it plain that the partnership was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... determined to expose him, and save your sister. During the past few months I have been making this investigation, to find that the supposed immaculate Harper Elliston is known in Gotham in certain circles as a gambler and villain of the deepest dye. He has committed some crimes that are worse than murder. Now, as to the wart: It was soon after I had heard of the murder on the express train, that while riding in the smoking car of an emigrant train ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... eighty-third year. You know the manner of my life up until this meeting. I have had absolutely nothing to do with religion. As you know I have lived a life of great wickedness. I have been a drunkard, a gambler—a mighty sinner. For fifty-three years I had not gone near a church service until this meeting began. I have been thoroughly put out with the type of Christianity exhibited in this community these past years. But when through sheer curiosity I came into ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... study the rules for makes and never under any circumstances give your partner misinformation; this is the most vital rule there is, and any one who disregards it is detested at the bridge table. No matter how great the temptation to make a gambler's bid, you are in ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... jeering laughter, and above it all the sweet pleading of a little girl begging for a father's life. And the quick blood came into his fair German face, and he felt that he could not save this Norman Anderson from the toils of the gambler, though he might, if provoked, pitch him over the guard of the boat. For was not Andrew's letter, which described the mob, in his pocket, and burning a hole in his pocket as it had been ever since ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... she admitted. "I was not made for domesticity. Sometimes I think that I was not made to be wife to any man. I am a gambler at heart. I love the fierce draughts of life. ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... That brow was the brow of the public Charles Fox, the thinker, the philanthropist, the man who rallied and led the Liberal party during the twenty most hazardous years of its existence. That jaw was the jaw of the private Charles Fox, the gambler, the libertine, the drunkard. Yet to his sins he never added the crowning one of hypocrisy. His vices were as open as his virtues. In some quaint freak of Nature, two spirits seemed to have been joined in one body, and the same frame to contain ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism. A man may be a fine archaeologist, and yet have no sympathy with human ideals. The historian, the biographer, even the poet, may be a money-market gambler, a social toady, a clamorous Chauvinist, or an unscrupulous wire-puller. As for "leaders of science," what optimist will dare to proclaim them on the side of the gentle virtues? And if one must needs think in this ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... another really big fire here?" rejoined Mr. Hurd, almost contemptuously; but under the surface Charlie believed that his attitude of contempt was more or less assumed. He believed he had made a distinct impression, and it was therefore almost with a gambler's instinct that he brought forth his ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... hospitality, by carrying disgrace and infamy into every domestic circle to which they can by any means obtain admittance. It ought to be a source of pride to my countrymen, that they are more of a marrying people than the English or French, and do not regard women in the same degraded light as a gambler does a pack of cards, that are to be shuffled and played with for a while, and then thrown away. Our naval and military officers are rather remarkable for their readiness to form matrimonial connexions; while on the other hand, our young men who are educated to the law, physic, or ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... mad, mentally irresponsible. It certainly seems so to me now. Possibly I had the fever of a gambler playing for high stakes. At all events, I plunged to the limit—and the market went against me. I tried to extricate myself, but too late. It was impossible. All the capital at my command was lost, and ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... be to him lackey and serving-man and all, without any wage beyond his expenses paid. Angiolieri answered that he would nowise take him, not but he knew him to be right well sufficient unto every manner of service, but for that he was a gambler and bytimes a drunkard, to boot. But the other replied that he would without fail keep himself from both of these defaults and affirmed it unto him with oaths galore, adding so many prayers that Angiolieri was prevailed upon and said that he ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Cameron called "one of those damned literary fellows" and Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as "a leeterary celeebrity." But some malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was easy to become The National Gambler in Nast's cartoons, and yet easier The National Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting mint-julep joke; but the phantom of the laurel crown would never linger upon my ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... a player's fingers stumble more than once before he could turn over the momentous slip of pasteboard. As the Prince's turn drew nearer, he was conscious of a growing and almost suffocating excitement; but he had somewhat of the gambler's nature, and recognised almost with astonishment that there was a degree of pleasure in his sensations. The nine of clubs fell to his lot; the three of spades was dealt to Geraldine; and the queen of hearts to Mr. Malthus, who ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sopo, a gambler, next appeared and tossed handfuls of coins into a blanket. He stated that if heads came up, the people won and would have good health, but if they lost, their lives were his. As soon as he threw, the people rushed up, and if they saw any tails they were quickly turned, ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... hurried downstairs to greet them. He was pale, but quite composed. All the nervous uncertainty of the previous day had vanished. He was armed and willing for the fray. If, as was by no means unlikely, Wong Li Fu staked everything on a gambler's throw and led his cohort in a daylight raid on the house, the Manchu leader would meet ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... their contracts, the premium on gold at the date of their purchase, and would bring bankruptcy and ruin to thousands. Fluctuation, however, in the paper value of the measure of all values (gold) is detrimental to the interests of trade. It makes the man of business an involuntary gambler, for in all sales where future payment is to be made both parties speculate as to what will be the value of the currency to be paid and received. I earnestly recommend to you, then, such legislation as will ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... he entered upon his 'profession,' that of a wit, gambler, club-lounger, and man about town; for these many characters are all mixed in the one which is generally called 'a wit.' Let us remember that he was good-hearted, and not ill-intentioned, though imbued with the false ideas of his day. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... and richness of incident. The suicide of the gambler is a startling effect; worthy of the imagination and ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... don't. I know your uncle's address: yes! you may well turn pale, and gnaw your lip—other people can plot and scheme as well as yourself: if I'm not paid before I leave this place, and that will be by to-night's mail, your uncle shall be told that his nephew is an insolvent gambler; and the old tutor, the Rev. Dr. Mildman, shall have a hint that his head pupil is little better ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... read by Mr. H. but not so many present on account of the cold—again in the evening with a sermon from Mr. G. from John, 14th chap., 15th verse, "If ye love me keep my commandments." Captain K. said he did not consider himself a gambler though he had lost 1, 2, 3 or L400 a night; once at Paris he lost a good deal. Since then he had made it a rule not to give checks, but merely stake what he had with him; when he lost the large sums they were out of his winnings. Talked of some ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... Barrett, for trustee or executor; he was such a solid, respectable, square-toed man, the personification of integrity. And he died, suddenly, and then it was found that he'd led a double life, and had an establishment here in London, and was a gambler and a speculator, and Heaven knows what, and all the money that had been intrusted to him was nowhere, and he'd systematically forged, and cooked accounts, and embezzled corporation money—and he'd no doubt have gone on doing it for many a year longer if he hadn't had ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... listening intently. From the last vessel of the line came the sound of low voices, accompanied at intervals by the click of the oblong bone dice with which the men were gambling. This was a boon, for when the Indian, a born gambler, is engaged in one of his games of chance, he is oblivious of all else around him. But on Angria's gallivat there was no sound. Rising to a crouching position, so that his form could not be seen if any of the gamblers chanced to look in his direction, Desmond slowly crept aft, halting ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... had made short trips on the river was one composed of two men. Phil Foote was a gambler, stage robber, and bad man in general. He had broken out of jail in Salt Lake City and, accompanied by another of similar character, stole a boat at Green River, Utah, and proceeded down the river. Soon after entering Cataract Canyon, they lost their boat and provisions. Finding a tent which had ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... certain. A hundred dollars was better than nothing. It would take him to Chicago, and enable him to live in comfort for a while. Besides, he might multiply it many times at the gaming table, for Tom Burns had been a gambler in his day. He certainly did not propose to disdain the sum which fortune had placed in his way simply because it was so small. Oh, no, Tom Burns was not that sort of ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... speak, who find in the contrasts of life the mockery of death. I looked upon that frivolous idea, if it was serious and not a simple antithesis made in pleasantry, as the conceit of a heart that has known no real experience. The gambler who leaves the table at break of day, his eyes burning and hands empty, may feel that he is at war with nature like the torch at some hideous vigil; but what can the budding leaves say to a child who mourns a lost father? The ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... him. A heat-ray cylinder—that was legitimate. But we found a small battery and eavesdropping microphone similar to the one Venza had mentioned that Shac the gambler was carrying. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... you think, Miss Newville, that everybody of noble birth or high position is a gambler, but every one who plays, of course, wants a stake ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... go again. Profane language and bettin' on horses! WHAT'LL come next? My own brother a gambler and a prodigate! Has it come ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... suit wide open. A lot of them are big, and a lot of them are fast. Once we were inside, we'd have no maneuverability to speak of. If the termites didn't get to us before we got inside. Suits won't do it here." He was a gambler, and a gambler doesn't ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... say," growled the gambler, bringing forth a new pack. "Chance and luck are then twin companions. Will ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... you," I replied, "seeing is believing." "Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will," cried a large, spotted bird. "That," thought I, "is a prize fighter." "Cheat, cheat!" urged a pious-looking cardinal, who evidently mistook me for a gambler. "Don't," roared a bullfrog, who was seated on a log and winked his eye at me. "There is an honest man," I thought. "Shake, good sir." In consternation and surprise, I instantly released his hand. "HOW is it possible to be both honest and slippery at the same time! This ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... more than a year ago few men of his age—he had then been sixty, he was now sixty-one—enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... she distrusted, took out his watch. He had a horse ranch some distance off, and the farmers called him a sport. As a matter of fact, he was a successful petty gambler, but generally lost his winnings by speculating in real-estate ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... and horse-racing. When a man backs a worthless horse against the field, money probably is transferred from the stupider to the shrewder party. The philosopher may say that the sooner a prodigal and his money are parted the better; but the broken gambler remains a burden and a threat to honest society. Gambling, lotteries, and speculation cause embezzlement, crime, unhappy homes, and wrecked lives.[6] Here are to be found with difficulty the true boundaries between ethics and expediency. A busybody despotism may protect the fool, but it thereby ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... of ex-Governor Roberts, of Iowa, and leaves a wife and two children to mourn his untimely end. As for Graham, nothing certain is known of his antecedents. It is said that he was engaged in the late robbery of Wells & Fargo's express at Grizzly Bend, and that he was an habitual gambler. Only one thing about him is certainly well known: he was a lieutenant in the Confederate army, and served under General Price and the outlaw Quantrell. He was a man originally of fine education, plausible manners ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... luck man has no glimmer of prescience. Day by day we rattle the box, throw the dice; but of how these will fall we have no knowledge. We only hope with the gambler's feverishness; and it is this very hazard that keeps us crowding and pushing to hold our place at the tables where fortune spins. Grow we sick of the game, sour with our luck, weary of the hazard, and relinquish we ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... it is to such men a thing absolutely good in itself. But such a one was not Sir Thomas Underwood. And there are men who love work, who revel in that, who attack it daily with renewed energy, almost wallowing in it, greedy of work, who go to it almost as the drunkard goes to his bottle, or the gambler to his gaming-table. These are not unhappy men, though they are perhaps apt to make those around them unhappy. But such a one was not Sir Thomas Underwood. And again there are men, fewer in number, who will work ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... dryly, "I am, I hope, a Christian man, but it would be difficult to convince me that the gambler, cattle-thief, and whisky-runner who ruined every man and woman who trusted him will be admitted to the same place as clean-lived English gentlemen. There are, my dear, plenty ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... and the sub-rector, and the almoner played at cards together, and that the rector won money from the others—the almoner had told him so—and, moreover, that the rector was the thaif of the world, and had been a gambler in his youth, and had once been kicked out of a club-house at Dublin for cheating at cards, and after that circumstance had apparently reformed and lived decently till the time when I came to the religious house with my pack, but that the sight of that had brought him back ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... to be so, his debts grew daily greater, and in society one talked of nothing but his lavish expenditure and his creditors. I know that the purses of forty women were at his disposal. I know, moreover, that he used to gamble like a prince, and I would never marry my waiting-maid to a gambler ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... was perhaps the most skilful of all those of Napoleon. Everything was done accurately and rapidly, and without throwing away chances. Some of his later campaigns, though equally brilliant, show him acting more with the gambler's spirit, running unnecessary risks with almost a blind reliance upon his star, in the hope of obtaining results which should dazzle ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... than Shiva; and he has kept a sample of each incarnation, and fused it into his constitution. In the course of his evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Nucingen would lap up all the mud between the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Rue de Crenelle to gain admission to my salon." What the duchesse did not reveal was that Anastasie had a lover, Count Maxime de Trailles, a gambler and a duellist. To pay the gambling losses of this unscrupulous lover, to the extent of two hundred thousand francs, the Countess de Restaud induced Old Goriot to sell out of the funds nearly all that remained of his great fortune, and give ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... lookout for a fare. Francis had sometimes accepted the offer, because it was an amusement to see where the passenger wished to go—to guess whether he was a lover hastening to keep an appointment, a gambler on a visit to some quiet locality, where high play went on unknown to the authorities, or simply one who had by some error missed his own gondola, and was anxious to return home. It made no difference to him which way he rowed. It was always possible that some adventure was to ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... they're up to," said the little telegraph boy to himself. "I know one of them fellers is a gambler. Wonder who that feller with him is? Them ...
— Helping Himself • Horatio Alger
... an inveterate gambler, and in Paraguari two at least of the houses are devoted to public play. They are crowded nightly, and often the stakes amount to five hundred or a thousand francs. Quarrels frequently arise over the play, and then the knife is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Many worthy parents have been ruined by the sons whom they had sent thither to be made scholars of; but who have learnt only to be "gentlemen" in the popular acceptation of the word. To be a "gentleman" nowadays, is to be a gambler, a horse-racer, a card-player, a dancer, a hunter, a roue,—or all combined. The "gentleman" lives fast, spends fast, drinks fast, dies fast. The old style of gentleman has degenerated into a "gent" and a "fast" man. "Gentleman" has become ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... gathered a more and more unsavoury reputation until its like was not to be found outside a penitentiary. The crux of his career in his own country was reached during a midnight quarrel in Chicago when he shot a negro gambler. After that, the negro having recovered and the matter being somehow arranged so that the prosecution was dropped, Harman's wife left him, and the papers recorded her application for a divorce. She was George Ward's second cousin, the daughter of a Baltimore ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... arrange that Mrs. Beaudesart should overhear you discussing some horrible scandal in connection with me. And mind, she would have to believe it, or you would be a ruined man for the rest of your life—you would be a defaulting gambler, a byword, a hissing, an astonishment, with the curse of Cain upon your brow. Then she would spurn me with contumely, and I would be my own man again. I would be in sanctuary, so to speak; inviolable by reason of my disgrace. Metaphorically, you could lay the blast, and fire it at your leisure, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... cabinet. Guildford had recommended Sir Thomas Meres, who, like himself, ranked among the Trimmers. Jeffreys, who missed no opportunity of crossing the Lord Keeper, had pressed the claims of Sir John Trevor. Trevor had been bred half a pettifogger and half a gambler, had brought to political life sentiments and principles worthy of both his callings, had become a parasite of the Chief Justice, and could, on occasion, imitate, not unsuccessfully, the vituperative style of his patron. The minion of Jeffreys was, as might ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Bostonian, out of his modest pile was tempted to stake an ounce of gold-dust. Though his head was hardly in a condition to follow the game intelligently, he won, or at least Bill and Jack told him he had, and for the first time Lawrence felt the rapture of the successful gambler, as he ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... at Lyons. She died in 1804, and he never recovered from the blow. In the same year he was appointed professor of mathematics at the lycee of Lyons. His small treatise, Considerations sur la theorie mathematique du jeu, which demonstrated that the chances of play are decidedly against the habitual gambler, published in 1802, brought him under the notice of J. B. J. Delambre, whose recommendation obtained for him the Lyons appointment, and afterwards (1804) a subordinate position in the polytechnic school at Paris, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... snow-shoes, In the play of quoits and ball-play; Skilled was he in games of hazard, In all games of skill and hazard, Pugasaing, the Bowl and Counters, Kuntassoo, the Game of Plum-stones. Though the warriors called him Faint-Heart, Called him coward, Shaugodaya, Idler, gambler, Yenadizze, Little heeded he their jesting, Little cared he for their insults, For the women and the ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... there came well-authenticated stories of his being not only a professed gambler, but also very dissipated in his habits. To this last charge Agnes could testify, as his breath had frequently betrayed him. He was accordingly dismissed. Still he perseveringly pursued her, always managing, if possible, to get ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... vigorously, but when Ward came, asking me to take my money back and showing all the best side of his nature, he gave me more to think about than I wanted. An entirely different man had appeared, acknowledging himself a gambler, and not pretending to be sorry—for which I liked him—but with qualities which I had ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... identity," Sir Roland whispered. "I recognize the portrait in that locket; I couldn't possibly mistake it seeing that years ago I knew the original well. It's a miniature of Lady Logan, who died some years ago. Her husband, Lord Logan, was a gambler, a spendthrift, and a drunkard, and he treated her with abominable cruelty. They had one child, a son. I remember the son sitting on my knee when he was quite a little chap—he couldn't at that time have been more ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... Jim Kershaw, the gambler, waits,—white his hands and slim. Bill whispers, "Belle, you know it well; it is me or him. Jim Kershaw, so help me God, if you dance with Belle It is either you or me must travel down to hell." Jim put his arm around her waist, her graceful waist ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... returned from a scouting expedition, he took a hand in a game of poker, and in the course of the game he became involved in a quarrel with Dave Tutt, a professional gambler, about a watch which he had won from Tutt, who would not give ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... nothing to say. With a long whispered whistle, he drops into the wicker chair and stares before him like a beggared gambler. But a cunning look soon comes into his face. He leans over towards her on his right elbow, and speaks in ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... who seemed most disturbed by the departure, and tried to hinder it by every means in his power, was Friar Robert. Immersed in his political schemes, bending over his mysterious plans with all the eagerness of a gambler who is on the point of gaining, the Dominican, who thought himself on the eve of a tremendous event, who by cunning, patience, and labour hoped to scatter his enemies and to reign as absolute autocrat, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... show that this news meant anything to him. It was promotion—better pay, a better chance for advancement, an easier life. But Jack Roberts had learned to take good and ill fortune with the impassive face of a gambler. ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... great hall was fifty-three by forty-five feet, the ball-room seventy-five by twenty-seven. This abode was furnished in a style of the most lavish splendor, and Mr. Wellesley-Pole's income was more than adequate to maintain it in befitting style. But no income is adequate to meet the expenses of a gambler and spendthrift, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... these images are as various as the stars; and, like them, differ one from another in magnitude. It is the quality of the aspiration that determines the true success or failure of a life. A man may aspire to be the best billiard-player, the best coachman, the best wardroom politician, the best gambler, or the most cunning cheat. He may rise to be eminent in his calling; but, compared with other men, his greatest height will be below the level of the failure of him who chooses an honest profession. No jugglery ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... first a gambler, a votary of Chance; and the blind goddess had always been very kind to Mr. Anisty. He felt that here again she was favoring him. Maitland he had eliminated from this girl's life; Maitland had failed to keep his engagement, and so would ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... can never rest. "Desire for action grows with us;" and in action of some sort, be it politics or science, life (if it is to be life at all) must be passed by each of us. Even the gambler must ply the dice-box, and the man of pleasure seek excitement in society. But in the true life of action, still the ruling principle ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... She had the gambler's instinct; her whole life had been a gamble, now winning, now losing, even to that moment when her lover had ridden up to the hotel and solved her doubts about the rich suitor. In Colorado she had known men whose fortunes came over night, "millions ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... for—they don't speak my language. You are what they call a manipulator of stocks. That means that you are living on the weaknesses of other people, and it almost means that you get your daily bread—yes—and your cake and your wine, too, from the sweat and toil of others. You're a safe gambler, a 'gambler under cover.' Show me a man who's dealing bank; he's free and above board. But you—you can figure the percentage against you, and then if you buck the tiger and get stung, you do it with your eyes open. With you Wall Street men, the game is crooked twelve months of the year. ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... feelings of suppressed scorn and resentment, which a sense of lost station and slighted importance engendered. Mr. Marston's early habits had, unhappily, been of a kind to aggravate, rather than alleviate, the annoyances incidental to reduced means. He had been a gay man, a voluptuary, and a gambler. His vicious tastes had survived the means of their gratification. His love for his wife had been nothing more than one of those vehement and headstrong fancies, which, in self-indulgent men, sometimes result in marriage, and which seldom ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a gambler and a spendthrift. A year or two in town established you as an amiable, undisguised debauchee. The ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... covetous and grasping; he strides through the gilded halls of ambitious emperors and ministers, who go with "light hearts" to kill thousands of human beings with newly-invented infernal machines; he works havoc in the brains of the vain. The Devil shuffles the cards for the gambler, and destroys our peace whether he makes us win or lose on the turf; he sits joyfully grinning on the tops of bottles and tankards filled with alcoholic drinks; he entices us on Sundays to shut our museums and open our gin-palaces; ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... a moment they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot see out of their eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their boots. They leave the track and try across country with a gambler's desperation, for it seems as if it were impossible to make the situation worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from boulder to boulder, or plod along paths that are now no more than rivulets, and across waste clearings where the scattered shells and broken ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... His lie was doubtless a bold device to put mademoiselle into his power, and to get entrance to my company. It was a last resource, it was just as likely to bring death as to bring success, but he had taken a gambler's chances. They had gone against him, and he had ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... fellow-courtiers, with knotted muscles which could fell an ox or crush a horse-shoe with the closing of a hand, Gregory Orloff was reputed the bravest man in Russia, as he was the idol of his soldiers. He was also a notorious gambler and drinker and the hero ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... get rich by trading in lots, went back to his plow and his chores, a sadder and wiser, although generally poorer, man. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands during the boom. Exactly who "beat the game," to use the gambler's expression, has never been known. Certain it is, that for every man in Kansas who admits that he made money out of the excitement and inflation, there are at least fifty who say that the ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... success of that adventurer Sacco, that schemer and gambler who had always fished in troubled waters, was an abomination, the beginning of the end. His son Luigi certainly distressed him; but it was even worse to think that—whilst Luigi, with his great intelligence and many remaining fine qualities, was nothing at all—Sacco, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... also pursued by Sir Merlin, and finally weds her in despite of his father, brother and the beldame. But Sir Rowland shortly relents and even forgives his eldest son, who has married Diana, the cast off mistress of a gambler, whilst Lady Youthly is left to the tender consolations ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... money in my pocket, to come to a certain house in two hours' time, binding me by an oath not to mention the circumstance to any one. I went at the time agreed on, and was shown by a servant into a room, where, soon afterwards, I was joined by a young officer, whom I knew to be a gambler and a man of ruined fortune. I therefore guessed that he wanted me to perform some desperate piece of work or other for him. 'Well, what is it you want of me?' I asked, in rather a sulky mood, for somehow ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... thump on the table, and Bill, unlucky gambler, rose with an oath that would have been savage if ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... Man Higher Up. Higginbotham was his agent. This man, one of the wealthiest realty operators in New York, was a born gambler. He could never resist the impulse to engage in a venture that would bring him big returns on his investment. In his realty operations, this quality had earned him the name of ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... two players, who, their cards concealed in their hands, watched each other with sharp glances. Hermann Heideck, who had stepped behind Irwin, noticed on the right hand of the Captain a magnificent diamond ring. But he also perceived, by the way the bright sparkle of the stone quivered, how the gambler's fingers trembled. ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... at it—never mind the bough,—it's only smashed your tile! Now we're with them. See, they're tailing, from the fierceness of the pace, Up the hedgerow, o'er the meadow, 'cross the stubble see them race: Governor—by Belvoir Gambler,—he's the hound to "run to head," Tracing back to Rallywood, that fifty years ago was bred; Close behind comes Arrogant, by Acrobat; and Artful too; Rosy, bred by Pytchley Rockwood; Crusty, likewise staunch ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... failings, and soon our brief passion had burnt itself out. Ah, me! with what regret I used to look back to this quiet town, and the stately calm of Oaklands, after one of our vulgar quarrels. I learned too soon that my husband was a gambler, and that my fortune had been a more coveted prize than myself; but fortunately, neither of us could touch anything but the interest until my eldest child should come of age. So often in my free-hearted days we had made merry over my father's ridiculous will! Now how I thanked him for his ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... you, Dave, the movement is on now, and before long it'll hit us like a tidal wave. I've been a bit of a gambler all my life, but this is the biggest jack-pot ever was, and I'm going to sit ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... him as a gambler loves his cards, or as the fire loves the coals. He idealised him; he dreamt about him; he liked to breathe the air that Eberhard breathed; he saw a chosen being in him; he imputed all manner of heroic deeds to him, and was immeasurably ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Or there is the ring-dropping trick, it is as old as the hills. Or there is the sham sailor—now very rarely met with. When we have another war he will come to the front again. We have still the cheating gambler, but he has always been with us. In King Charles the Second's time he was called a Ruffler, a Huff, or a Shabbaroon. The woman who now begs along the streets singing a hymn and leading borrowed children, did the same thing two hundred years ago and was called a clapperdozen. The man who pretends ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... one frank word. There was in his look the prayer of a desperate gambler who watches a card poised between the dealer's fingers. Jacqueline had one answer only. But exactly how to express it, lest she be ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Suicide!—the gambler's end! Already the Potter's Field claims many of these victims. The successful murderers and thugs linger in the dark shadows of Dupont Street. They crowd Murderer's Alley, Dunbar's ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... not for us to blame him who lived under his roof and profited by his generosity. He was a benefactor to us in our trouble—for we were poor, too." But here Erle checked himself abruptly, for he did not care to tell Fern that his father had been a gambler, and had squandered all his wife's property; but he remembered almost as vividly as though it were yesterday, when he was playing in their miserable lodgings at Naples, after his father's death—how a grave, stern-faced man came into the room and sat down beside ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... he was watching her with calculating eyes. He was a gambler with life, and he rather suspected that he had ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... gambler after all," she declared. "If you do not redeem the ranch, he will get odds of two and a half to one on his million-dollar bet and clean up in a year. With water on the lands of the San Gregorio, Okada's people will pay five hundred dollars an ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... affectionate distrust inspired by those who are prone to fits and starts of work and play, conviviality and loneliness. To women, he was almost universally attractive. But if he had scorched his wings a little once or twice, he had kept heart-free on the whole. He was, it must be confessed, a bit of a gambler, the sort of gambler who gets in deep, and then, by a plucky, lucky plunge, gets out again, until some day perhaps—he stays there. His father, a diplomatist, had been dead fifteen years; his mother was well known in the semi-intellectual circles of society. He had no brothers, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... upright—laid on Alda's wrist a long bony burning hand, whose clasp she did not forget for weeks, and forcing her to look at him, said, 'Did you allow it to be believed that your brother Felix was a gambler?' ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... active service in the Philippines. But Aguinaldo's surrender put a quietus on this project, and he entered a broker's office in Wall Street Here, in the maelstrom of frenzied finance, his pent up energies found an outlet. He went into the stock gambling game with the feverish energy of a born gambler. Months of excitement followed, luck being usually with him. He was successful. He doubled and tripled his capital, after which he had good sense enough to stop, withdrawing from the fray before the tide turned. But he could not give up the life entirely. ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... The gambler dropped his dog's-ear'd cards, The waiting-women screamed, As the light of the fire, like stains of blood, On the wild men's sabres gleamed. Then into their cups they splashed their crusts, And cursed the fool of a town, And ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... admiration and respect, and congratulations upon his present position. This was an unanswerable denial; and so he sent the letter to Baltimore. This story, fabricated out of nothing but malice, was meant to injure in two ways, by proving him a gambler, and also pusillanimous. The slanderous officer will probably cease to be one, as I believe falsehood is not considered ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... intervening countryside, and taking a gambler's chance, took the Rolls Royce up the hill. He knew exactly what he was about, and he knew that the powerful engine would eat up the slope ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... the penitent. The first object was to drive no person out of the pale of the Church. Since there were bad people, it was better that they should be bad Catholics than bad Protestants. If a person was so unfortunate as to be a bravo, a libertine, or a gambler, that was no reason for making him ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... deck, every pleasant day, a large, well-dressed man, attended by his valet, generously opened a barrel of fresh oysters for the passengers. This benevolent gentleman proved to be a famous Saratoga gambler. In this way he made many acquaintances and friends, and each day he increased his winnings at cards and in bets on the vessel's run, till finally, not he, but the guileless passengers paid for ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... show some variations. Each nut tree is a new individual but with a family inheritance strongly enough marked to make the planting of seedlings, when done in large quantities, from the best parents, a sort of gamble in which the percentage is in favor of the gambler—which is, as you should ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... that I learned something about the couple who had preceded us in the use of these rooms. They were of middle age and of great personal elegance but uncertain pay, the husband being nothing more nor less than a professional gambler. Their name ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Netta. Then you do not hate me, although they have done their best to make you do so, by calling me gambler, spendthrift, drunkard, and ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... his new capital, Indra-prastha, to Hastina-pura the capital of Duryodhan, with his mother and brothers and Draupadi. And as Yudhishthir lost game after game, he was stung with his losses, and with the recklessness of a gambler still went on with the fatal game. His wealth and hoarded gold and jewels, his steeds, elephants and cars, his slaves male and female, his empire and possessions, were all ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... himself to be repulsed. It seemed to him that his future, his honor, his whole life hung upon this moment. He felt like a gambler who has staked his last hope upon one throw of the dice. If this fails, all hope is gone; no future, no life is left, nothing but the grave awaits him. With impetuous violence he seized the hand of the rich Itzig. ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... flow of capital into certain forms of investment, and, to some small extent, the commercial crises incidental thereto, it does not explain the vital problem, the source of capitalist income. The chances of gain, as a premium for the risks involved, explain satisfactorily enough the action of the gambler when he enters into a game of roulette or faro. It cannot be said, however, that the aggregate wealth of the gamblers is increased by playing roulette or faro. Then, too, the risks of the laborers are vastly more vital than those of the capitalist. Yet the premium for their risks of health and life ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... dealt in a hasty fashion with one or two horse-thieves," he continued. "Also with a gambler who was put ashore here from a river packet and subsequently became involved in a dispute with a late citizen of this place touching the number of aces in a pack of cards. It is not for me to criticize! What I may term the spontaneous love of justice ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... known as Nikolaus Lenau, the third in the group of the poets of Weltschmerz (Lord Byron is the best example in England), was born in Southern Hungary August 13, 1802. The father, a gambler and libertine, died before the boy was five years old; the mother, a high strung, passionate woman, battled with poverty for the sake of her children, of whom Nikolaus was her idol. His first impression of nature ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... the municipal government. To put down the nuisance Swift took a characteristic method. Ebenezer Elliston had, about this time, been executed for street robbery. Although given a good education by his parents, he forsook his trade of a silk weaver, and became a gambler and burglar. He was well known to the other gangs which infested Dublin, but his death did not act as a deterrent. Swift, in composing Elliston's pretended dying speech, gave it the flavour and character of authenticity in order to impose on the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... confirmed Blake. "Cut it out, though. A gambler is a fool. More fun in a nickel earned than a dollar made ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... I confess? My sins? They are too many. As for that money, I hoped to return it as any son might hope to reimburse his father for money advanced to pay a gambler's debt. I said I meant to work. My first money earned shall ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... mind. Another sky, other customs, another language, grave responsibilities, a novel and difficult undertaking of uncertain outcome—I was willing to risk all simply to distract my attention and to forget. I have never in my life been a gambler, but that time I staked my artistic reputation upon a single card. Failure would have been a new emotion, severe and grievous, it is true, but still different from that which filled my mind. I played, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... repeated, his eyes glistening with anger. "Do men like you believe men like me? I have a past, you know, of antecedents, as you would say. The past! They throw that in my face, as if, the future depended on the past. Well, yes; it's true, I'm a debauchee, a gambler, a drunkard, an idler, but what of it? It's true I have been before the police court, and condemned for night poaching—what does that prove? I have wasted my life, but whom have I wronged if not myself? My past! Have I not sufficiently ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... feeling against Tennessee had grown up on the Bar. He was known to be a gambler; he was suspected to be a thief. In these suspicions Tennessee's Partner was equally compromised; his continued intimacy with Tennessee after the affair above quoted could only be accounted for on the hypothesis of a copartnership of crime. At last Tennessee's guilt ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... believe in preparing thoroughly before an attack, but they are ready at times to take a gambler's chance if the moment seems opportune to win by striking the enemy a sudden ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... Prince Vasili in his monotonous voice. "I never could understand how Nataly made up her mind to marry that unlicked bear! A perfectly absurd and stupid fellow, and a gambler ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... be more fatal still, and the Polish state might conceivably disappear before military aid from the Allied governments could reach it. Why should the safety of Poland and to some extent the security of Europe be made to depend upon what is at best a gambler's throw? ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... as if he were going to weep, and in a quivering voice he asked if I could help him. He was going home to marry a maiden in Kent whom he described as "a pure good girl." He felt unworthy, for he was a gambler and a periodical drunkard, and he thought that if a man like Creedan could be ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... was perpetrated a crime of violence no worse than many hundreds which had preceded it, but occurring at a psychological time. A gambler named Charles Cora shot and killed William Richardson, a United States marshal. The shooting was cold-blooded and without danger to the murderer, for at the time Richardson was unarmed. Cora was at once hustled to jail, not so much for confinement as for safety against ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... character and habits of life were generally known, yet the laxity of feeling with respect to property prevented his being looked on with the abhorrence with which he must have been regarded in a more civilized country. He was considered, among his more peaceable neighbours, pretty much as a gambler, cock-fighter, or horse-jockey would be regarded at the present day; a person, of course, whose habits were to be condemned, and his society, in general, avoided, yet who could not be considered as marked with the indelible ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... who was anxious for his reputation, endeavored to keep him within the bounds of decency. But Milo's mind was fastened on the province which was to redeem his fortunes, and he flung into bribery what was left of his wrecked credit with the desperation of a gambler. He had not been praetor, and thus was not legally eligible for the consulate. This, however, was forgiven. He had been aedile in 54, and as aedile he had already been magnificent in prodigality. But to secure the larger prize, he gave ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... conveyance at night, as the coach crept by his place of concealment in the wayside brush, to elude the sheriff of Monterey County and his posse, who were after him. He had not made himself known to his fellow-passengers, as they already knew him as a gambler, an outlaw, and a desperado; he deemed it unwise to present himself in his newer reputation of a man who had just slain a brother gambler in a quarrel, and for whom a reward was offered. He slipped from the axle as the stage-coach ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... she proposed—the impertinence of it! It was a bargain she proposed—the value of it! In that shape ran Harry Wethermill's thoughts. He was in desperate straits, though to the world's eye he was a man of wealth. A gambler, with no inexpensive tastes, he had been always in need of money. The rights in his patent he had mortgaged long ago. He was not an idler; he was no sham foisted as a great man on an ignorant public. He had really some touch of genius, and he cultivated it assiduously. But the harder he worked, ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... of the drunkards take their first drink? Where did the gambler play his first card? Where did three-fourths of the women, who are to-day living a life of shame, have a man's arm about them for the ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... I never said nothing about what I'd got afore, and he never seemed to care to ask me. But it were all his deepness. One night he pulls out a pack of cards, and says, 'Let's have a game. Only for love,' says he, when he saw me look a little shyly at him. 'I'm not a gambler,' says he; 'I never plays for money.' So we has a game and a pipe together, and he pulls out a little flask of spirits, and we got very cheerful. But I was careful not to take too much that night. However, the rum set my tongue loose, and I let out something about ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... compelled by law to buy. In nine cases in ten the person who bought did so in the hope and expectation of getting much for little and something for nothing. The buyer was no better than the seller. He was a gambler. He "played against the game of the man who kept the table" (as the phrase went), and naturally he lost. Naturally, too, he cried out, but his lamentations, though echoed shrilly by the demagogues, seem to have been unavailing. Even the rudimentary ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... stand for that—pay me back, if you make enough. Otherwise—my risk. Something of a gambler, I am. Club'll pay for the fireworks—that's their show. Bonfires on the mountains around are easy. Lanterns cheap. Get special terms on the music—friend of mine can. Supper's up to you. Can you get ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... gotten from it a distorted idea of the Bible's teachings as to Hell; or they have taken some preacher's views as to the Bible's teachings on the subject. For example, here is a boy fifteen years of age, whose mother died when he was an infant, whose father is a drunkard and gambler and infidel, who has given the boy but little moral training; and here is a man seventy years of age who had a noble father and mother, who gave their boy every advantage, the best of training, under the best of influences; yet he when a boy turned ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... left Oxford a gambler and a spendthrift. A year or two in town established you as an amiable, undisguised debauchee. The rest is ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... said he, "I have always insisted that I possessed but a modicum of brains; but I am a gambler. My god is chance. With ordinary judgment and horse-sense, I take risks that no so-called sane man would consider. The curse of the world is fear—the chief instrument that you employ to hold the masses ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... it, so will your brothers, in their way,—and after their kind. More selfish than you: more eager and headstrong than you: they will rush on their destiny when the doomed charmer makes her appearance. Or if they don't, and you don't, Heaven help you! As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best. You don't die of the complaint: or very few do. The generous wounded heart suffers and survives it. And he is not ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... collected the whole or nearly the whole of his income. His secret, well guarded as it was, need be no secret to the reader. Mr. White, who had never touched a playing-card in his life and who grew apoplectic at the sin and shame of playing the races, was an inveterate gambler. His passion was for Sunken Treasure Syndicates, formed to recover golden ingots from ships of the Spanish Armada; for companies that set forth to harness the horse-power of the sea to the services of commerce; for optimistic ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... that Courtot had gone straight to the ranch-house and had sat down with his gun in front of him, waiting for Howard's step on the porch; that when the first opportunity arose Jim Courtot would start shooting. It was not to his liking that Courtot should have things all his way. The gambler would shoot from the dark, as he had done before, if he had the chance. That chance might come to-night or a year from now, and constant expectancy of this sort would, soon or late, get on a man's nerves. In short, if Courtot wanted to start something, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... billiard-room, and for them a veritable paradise is ready. The Mediterranean laps the beautiful shore at Monte Carlo and all along the exquisite Eiviera—the palms and ferns are lovely—the air is soft and exhilarating, and the gambler pursues his pleasing pastime amid the sweetest spots on earth. From every country in the world the flights of restless gamblers come like strange flocks of migrant birds. The Russian gentleman escapes from the desolate ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... not open; he did not dream that he was in the hands of a professed gambler, and, hoping to get back what he had lost, and what he felt he really could not spare from his small amount of funds, he ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... temperament there is two-fold danger. Walter is gambling, too, and bets high; he will, of course, be a prey to the more experienced ones, who will take advantage of his youth and generosity to rob him. For, is a professed gambler better ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... Stoneman was himself a gambler, and spent a part of almost every night at Hall & Pemberton's Faro Palace on Pennsylvania Avenue, a place noted for its famous restaurant. It was here that he met Colonel Howle and learned to like him. He was a man of talent, cool and audacious, and a liar of such singular ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... how I've tried and see what it has come to—Bessie so high-headed and airy she makes fun of us, and Fred a gambler and a drunkard, and 'most a thief. And it's all that ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... innkeeper that he could not pay the bill, and offered to leave the Old Master in exchange. When people do this it very often comes off, for the alternative is only the pleasure of seeing the man in gaol, whereas a picture is always a picture, and there is a gambler's chance of its turning up trumps. So the man grumbled and took the little thing. He hung it up in the best room of the inn, where he gave his ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... year ago few men of his age—he had then been sixty, he was now sixty-one—enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... A turfite and gambler, represented under the letters of Mr H—e, having lost all his money at Doncaster and the following York Meeting, devised a plan, with his coadjutor, to obtain the means for their departure from York, which, no doubt, will ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... never do as a detective. You lack intuition. Sometimes I think I haven't quite enough of it, either. Why didn't I think of that sooner? Don't you know she is the wife of Adolphus Hesse, the most inveterate gambler in stocks in the System? Why, I had only to put two and two together and the whole thing flashed on me in an instant. Isn't it a good hypothesis that she is the red haired woman in the case, the tool of the System in which her ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... "As great a gambler as my husband. They're all alike, abate: six times since last Easter has the bill been sent to me for that trifle of a turquoise buckle he made such a to-do about giving me." She rose and began to pace the room in disorder. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... had its place, the work table of the gentleman who never works, there were a dozen letters lying beside three newspapers of different opinions. With a single touch he spread out all these letters, like a gambler giving the choice of a card; and he scanned the handwriting, a thing he did each morning before opening ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Learn that the gambler never owns his winnings. The man who accumulates by sharp practices or by undue profits never owns it. Even the young person who has large fortune given him does not own it. We only own what we have rendered definite service to bound. ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... caught her by the shoulders, and swung her round to face him. He was swelling with anger. "You—Nick Pringle, that trading cheat, that gambler! After ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... circulation in a sort of reversal of Gresham's law. Every prisoner taken reasonably close to Army pay day could be counted on for a few dollars, and in each company there would be some lucky or skillful gambler who would have a fairly sizeable roll of greenbacks. And, of course, there was the sutler, the real prize catch; any Mosby man would pass up a general in order ...
— Rebel Raider • H. Beam Piper
... of malignant expectation—and they were estimable persons too. They were respectably connected—their words carried weight—and for a time I was an object of their maliciously pious fears. I was destined, according to their calculations, to be a gambler, a spendthrift, a drunkard, an incurable roue of the most abandoned character. Yet, strange to say, I became none of these things. Though a Neapolitan, with all the fiery passions and hot blood of my race, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... original ground of his ambition and his revolutionary projects, as though the desperate condition of his private affairs had suggested a civil war to his calculations as the best or only mode of redressing it. Such a policy would have resembled the last desperate resource of an unprincipled gambler, who, on seeing his final game at chess, and the accumulated stakes depending upon it, all on the brink of irretrievable sacrifice, dexterously upsets the chess-board, or extinguishes the lights. But Julius, ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... Garthwaite was lamenting to me. "Ran you right into a trap. We had a gambler's chance in the street, but in here there is no chance at all. It's all over but ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... apparently shattered beyond repair and trodden in the mud of dissipation and bold habitual sinning, verified the faith. The burglar who had been forty years in prison and penal servitude, the most shameless of Magdalens, the drinker and gambler brought down to the Embankment at midnight, greedy for a meal of soup and bread, the man or woman determined to end a state of despair and disgust with the world by suicide, these, under the influence of The Salvation Army, became 'new creations.' But the same conviction, ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... going away with his money, thinking with delight of the pleasure he should have in skating, and also of the money that would be left to carry home to his poor father, when the gambler said to him, "You foolish boy, why won't you play longer, and double your dollar? You may as well have two or three ...
— The Pedler of Dust Sticks • Eliza Lee Follen
... anxiously for such an opportunity, but now that it came he hesitated. He was desperately afraid of losing money. He had little of the gambler's spirit. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... common citizen a violent death was (and is) the worst of horrors; to the ancient highwayman it was the odd trick lost in the game of life. And the highwayman endured the rope, as the practised gambler loses his estate, without blenching. One there was, who felt his leg tremble in his own despite: wherefore he stamped it upon the ground so violently, that in other circumstances he would have roared with pain, and he left the world without ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... sleeve which was turned up in place of his left arm attested with what courage he fought at Patay, at the time of that sublime charge when the heroic General de Sonis unfurled the banner of the Sacred Heart. He had been a duelist, sportsman, gambler, lover, but to those of his old companions of pleasure whom chance brought to Rome he was only a devotee who lived economically, notwithstanding the fact that he had saved the remnants of a large fortune for alms, for reading and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... comparative poverty he speedily rose to wealth; and, as his means increased, so his avaricious schemes were multiplied and extended. His earlier days were passed in complete obscurity, none but the neediest spendthrift or the most desperate gambler knowing where he dwelt, and every one who found him out in his wretched abode near the Marshalsea had reason to regret his visit. Now he was well enough known by many a courtly prodigal, and his large mansion near Fleet Bridge (it was said of him that he always chose the ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... the most degraded vagrants were cradled in comfort, and have wandered from homes of splendour. Perhaps the vilest of the vile once were ministers of the Gospel. In a village, the other day, I was told of a man, once a Sunday- school teacher, but now a professional gambler, and, in a coal-pit I know in the North of England, the foulest-mouthed blasphemer was once a Methodist ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... surroundings waiting for the staggering steps of a son, or as you think of a wayward daughter, all this will be as nothing, for there is nothing that can give happiness to the parents of Godless, wayward children. Some one has said, "Every drunkard, every gambler, every lost woman once sat in a mother's lap, and the downfall of the most of them may be traced to some defect ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... dollars to furnish a cash bond and again recover the deeds of the Blue Poppy, he was no better off than before the strike was made. Long he thought, finally to come to his conclusion, and then, with the air of a gambler who has placed his last bet to win or lose, he ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... experienced all the interruptions to deep study, with which such elevated station is naturally attended. It was in vain for Waller, a wit, a courtier, and a politician; or for Denham, who was only distinguished at the university as a dreaming, dissipated gambler, to attempt to rival the metaphysical subtleties of Donne and Cowley, who had spent serious and sequestered lives in acquiring the knowledge and learning which they squandered in their poetry. Necessity, therefore and perhaps a dawning ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... it her fortune. For the parents of Mademoiselle Adelaide, who died suddenly of cholera, had left her but little; and the grandfather, a Creole from Martinique, an old beau of the time of the Directory, a gambler, a free liver, great in practical jokes and in duels, declared loudly and repeatedly that he should not add a penny ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... expression everywhere. Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down. But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one colour to another, or of gold raked about in ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... wanton homicide, and I am sure that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices. Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was hurtful to me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself. But late hours, he explained, were bad for one's health. He had seen men who did not take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler, and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On the other hand, he believed in ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... curiosity may have led them into the church of S. Moise, will remember to have seen there a monument to a famous Scotchman—John Law. This is the last home of an outlaw, a gambler, and an adventurer, who, by his amazing skill and effrontery, plunged the regency into a vortex of speculation, and for a time controlled the finances of France. He persuaded the regent that by a liberal ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... drawn revolvers and extinguishing the lights with forty-five caliber slugs, was forthwith arrested. To ride a horse into a saloon and order drinks for all hands meant jail and a heavy fine. To slay a gambler, or make a gun-play in a gambling-house, when luck was running badly, ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... appeared that Cousin Jane had only heard Susan Marckland say that Edward Bingham had told her that he was in California when "Uncle Sylvester" had been nearly hanged by a Vigilance Committee for protecting a horse thief or a gambler, or some such person. This was felt to be ineffective as a ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... personal hazard accounts for the growth of betting at games. The effort to gain adds to the interest, i. e., excitement. That it adds tension as well and may result in fatigue and further boredom is not reckoned with by the bettor or gambler. To follow the middle of the road in anything is difficult, and nowhere is it more beset with danger than in the seeking ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the heart of the West, of San Pasqual, a sun-baked desert town, of Harley P. Hennage, the best gambler, the best and worst man of San ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... of fish, he was glad, he and the damsel, and they both said to Ibrahim, 'O my lord, open the door and let him bring the fish in to us.' So he opened the door, and the Khalif entered, in his fisherman's disguise, and began by saluting them. Quoth Ibrahim, 'Welcome to the brigand, the robber, the gambler! Let us see thy fish.' So the Khalif showed them the fish and behold, they were still alive and moving, whereupon the damsel exclaimed, 'O my lord, these are indeed fine fish! Would that they were fried!' 'By Allah, O my mistress,' replied ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... slept but little. The superstition of the lover is no less keen than that of the gambler, and Bray, while laughing at Parkhurst's extravagant fancy, I am afraid was equally inclined to believe that their good fortune came through Eugenia's influence. At least he should tell her so, and her precious note became now an invitation as well as an excuse for ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... watery eyes and thin, unkempt hair, Maggie, who scrubbed floors for a living and could not write so much as her own name nor read the simplest child's primer; even Maggie was far too good for the worn-out drunkard and gambler whom she tended ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... for the conquest of Syria; but Manuel sent a portion of that army, and a strong fleet, to attack the principality. One of the generals of the land forces was Prosuch, a Turkish officer in high favor with his father. Raymond of Antioch was no longer the idle gambler he had shown himself in the camp of the emperor John; but though he was now distinguished by his courage and skill in arms, he was completely defeated, and the imperial army carried its ravages up to the very walls of Antioch, while the fleet laid waste the coast. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... highest and proudest personages of the Russian Court, including the Grand Duke Staniolanus, generally believed to be the heart and soul of the War Party. His imperial highness was well-known to be a desperate gambler, up to the neck in debts contracted at the card-table, and bent on recouping himself out of the wealth of Korea ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... with me to see the fun. The thought of that faithful soul, now beating somewhere on the seas, made me long for his comradeship. As I shaved, I remember wondering if I would ever shave again, and the thought gave me no tremors. For once in my sober life I was strung up to the gambler's pitch of adventure. ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... people had been called together to witness the feats of a celebrated juggler and gambler. The name of Colonel Crockett had gone through the nation; and gradually it became noised abroad that Colonel Crockett was in the crowd. "I wish I may be shot," Crockett says, "if I wasn't looked upon as almost as great a sight as ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... you something; a closer scrutiny showed you that it would tell you nothing. His eyes were of a piercing steely gray that seemed to read the thoughts of others, while they effectually concealed his own. Pony Rowell was known as a man who never went back on his word. He was a professional gambler. ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... have said, it appears to make a vivid impression on the gambler. His eyes kindle up with a strange light, in which surprise is succeeded by an expression of cupidity; while his manner proclaims that the revelation made to him is not only important, as he has been forewarned, ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... Laurence, the dead sister, quitting an unhappy home, was living as a vagabond on the streets of Paris, whence he had to be rescued. Since, to these worries and griefs, there was added certain disquieting news from Eve, whose aunt, from reading some of his books, supposed him to be a gambler and debauchee and was trying to turn her niece against him, it was not astonishing that he should have been completely unnerved. While at Sache, where he had come to stay with some friends, the de Margonnes, in order to terminate the work ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... four men that had stood by me most in my time; now one was a miser and smuggler, and got himself hung; and one was a thief, and died of a split wishbone, on what he called "a throne;" and one was a fighter and gambler and poet, and he had a heavy fist, and he turned remorseful into a Burmese monk; and one was Stevey Todd. And Madge Pemberton thought at one time I was all right, but she was wrong there. And I thought how here was Andrew and another Madge, and here was Billy Corliss, and here was the world ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... early life a successful gambler, and some suspicions of his fair play had been noised abroad; but, as has been recently seen in the instance of a man of rank equal to Lilburne's, though, perhaps, of less acute if more cultivated intellect, it is long before the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in the game, and while the dice were still being tossed for their very bones, they talked of—human material! They uttered those ruthless, shameful words without a shadow of indignation, as though it were natural for their living bodies to be no more than a gambler's chips in the hands of men who arrogated to themselves the right to play the game of gods. Without hesitating they laid their one, irrevocable life at the feet of a power that could not prove whether it had known how to place the stakes rightly ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... truly sorry that you risked it upon the hazardous chance of my liking or disliking the man of your choice! But as I had no hand in your venture, I do not feel the least responsible for your losses. Yours is the fate of a gambler in human hearts who has staked and lost—that ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... people thus disguised remained the same. Every type was gathered, from the sound, reasonable accumulator of wealth to the "hold-up," the gambler, the fugitive from the law. It was said of Leaping Horse that it only required the "dust" to buy any crime known to the penal code. And here, here at the Elysian Fields, on any night in the week, could be found the man or woman to perpetrate it at a ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... there are cases where advantage falls to a man which cannot be explained by anything he deserves, or has done to win it. And the advantage, such as it is, often works untold hurt as an example. Just as the winnings of one gambler may tempt a hundred others to their undoing, so a single case of coveted luck is apt to encourage young men to transfer their hopes of success in many directions, from law to luck. You see here and there a man who ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... everywhere, not hoping for something to turn up, but determined that his own cleverness should contrive that desirable arrival. When he met Anna Gessner at Ascot a year ago, the propitious moment seemed at hand. "The girl is a gambler to her very boots," he told himself, while he reflected that a seat upon the box of such a family coach would certainly make his fortune. Willy Forrest resolved to secure such a seat without a moment's loss ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... had applied for assistance, or subscriptions to her poem. The fact is, the duke's vices were turned, as vices frequently are, into scourges for his own back. He was a jovial, good-natured, affable, selfish man, an incessant and reckless gambler, quite devoid of all conscience about debts, and, indeed, of moral principle in general. When he got tired of Mrs. Clark, he meanly and heartlessly left her, with a promised annuity which he never paid, and with debts ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... obliged to borrow from the battery cash-box, for Ida kept a tight hand on the purse-strings, and he could not bring himself to cut down her housekeeping money. Of course, to balance these bad days there were runs of good luck, when he had a considerable surplus; but, like a true gambler, he did not set his winnings against his losses, considering them as so much pure gain, which enabled him to indulge in extravagances. He made new holes in order to stop up ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... bundle of hay worth $2, and $50 for a yard of cheesecloth worth five cents; barrels of ink had been bought for each legislator, though a pint would have sufficed; and an official of the Police Department was found guilty of conniving with a gambler named "Jim" Marshall to rob an express train. I watched the cases in court. I applauded at the meetings of leading citizens who denounced the grafters and passed resolutions in support of the candidates ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... come into existence since the 1849 gold rush to California. The mining industry supports a large population. These facts are the solid basis for the widespread popular interest in mineral investment—and mineral speculation. But there are other reasons for this interest,—the gambler's chance for quick returns, the "lure of gold," the possibility of "getting something for nothing," the mushroom nature of certain branches of the industry, the element of mystery related to nature's secrets, and the conception of minerals as bonanzas with ready-made ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... that you and me mightn't cotton to," said her husband. "This man is Jack Hamlin." As his wife's remote and introspective black eyes returned only vacancy, he added quickly. "The noted gambler!" ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... even the alternation of success and failure, which is the ordinary course of war, would be fatal to him; but brilliant success might, as I have said before, establish him. It would be playing double or quits. He is by nature a gambler. His self-confidence, his reliance, not only on himself, but on his fortune, exceeds even that of his uncle. He believes himself to have a great military genius. He certainly planned war a year ago. I do not believe that he has abandoned ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... he had a taste. And, joined to all the rest, there came a conviction that his real tastes did take that direction. She had never before heard that he had a passion for the turf; but if it should turn out that he was a gambler! Had any of her friends mentioned such an idea to her a week ago, how she would have rebuked that friend! But now she added this to her other grievances, and began to tell herself that she had become engaged to a man whom she did not know and ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... the gambler, unfolding a curious lore of flowers. "Those little potty, white things, split up the middle with a green head on top—grow under ferns. Come on. Cards are ready! ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... often doubted your blood relationship to Uncle Jabez," Mr. Hammond declared "He has no gambler's ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... Squire Wurley and Farmer Tester; that, because he happened to be poor, he should be turned out of the cottage where his family had lived for a hundred years, at a week's notice, through the caprice of a drunken gambler; that because he had stood up for his rights, and had thereby offended the worst farmer in the parish, he should be a marked man, and unable to get work—these things appeared so monstrous to Tom, and made him so angry, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... From the last vessel of the line came the sound of low voices, accompanied at intervals by the click of the oblong bone dice with which the men were gambling. This was a boon, for when the Indian, a born gambler, is engaged in one of his games of chance, he is oblivious of all else around him. But on Angria's gallivat there was no sound. Rising to a crouching position, so that his form could not be seen if any of the gamblers chanced to look in his direction, Desmond slowly crept aft, halting at every ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... by the honest stranger into trusting him. This trick was practised three hundred years ago. Or there is the ring-dropping trick, it is as old as the hills. Or there is the sham sailor—now very rarely met with. When we have another war he will come to the front again. We have still the cheating gambler, but he has always been with us. In King Charles the Second's time he was called a Ruffler, a Huff, or a Shabbaroon. The woman who now begs along the streets singing a hymn and leading borrowed children, ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... by burdensome debts. He was a gambler, too, and, of course, devoid of moral principle. His object was to pay ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... George Gawtrey, the captain, returned from abroad; he took a great fancy to me, and I left my father's house (which had grown insufferable) to live with him. He had been a very handsome man—a gay spendthrift; he had got through his fortune, and now lived on his wits—he was a professed gambler. His easy temper, his lively humour, fascinated me; he knew the world well; and, like all gamblers, was generous when the dice were lucky,—which, to tell you the truth, they generally were, with a man who had no scruples. Though his practices were a little suspected, ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... company were joined by the Rev. Jason Lee, who had come up the Columbia in the interests of the mission in the Willamette Valley. Seattle[B] was there, from the Willamette, then young, and not yet the titular chief of Governor Stevens.[C] It was a company of diverse spirits—Trevette, the reputed gambler, but the true friend of the Indian races; Lee, who had beheld Oregon in his early visions, and now saw the future of the mountain-domed country in dreams; sharp-tongued but industrious and warm-hearted Mrs. Woods; ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... able to see that the war he had so long supported had not yet attained sufficient defeat of the Prussian military machine to guarantee that future; but his pity and distress for all these young lives, cut down without a chance to flower, had grown till he had become, as it were, a gambler. What good—he would think—to secure the future of the young in a Europe which would soon have no young! Every country was suffering hideously—the criminal country not least, thank God! Suppose the war were to go on for another year, two, three ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... eleven he went up to the card-room and dragged Merrihew away. Merrihew gave up his chair reluctantly. He was winning. He would have been just as reluctant, however, had he been losing. The amateur gambler ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... the qualities of their parents. They all show some variations. Each nut tree is a new individual but with a family inheritance strongly enough marked to make the planting of seedlings, when done in large quantities, from the best parents, a sort of gamble in which the percentage is in favor of the gambler—which is, as ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Count Staumn, "is ever the enemy of good comradeship. Let us settle the point at once and finally, with the dice-box. Baron Brunfels, you are too seasoned a gambler to object to such a mode of terminating a discussion. Steinmetz, the law, of which you are so distinguished a representative, is often compared to a lottery, so you cannot look with disfavour upon ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... H. but not so many present on account of the cold—again in the evening with a sermon from Mr. G. from John, 14th chap., 15th verse, "If ye love me keep my commandments." Captain K. said he did not consider himself a gambler though he had lost 1, 2, 3 or L400 a night; once at Paris he lost a good deal. Since then he had made it a rule not to give checks, but merely stake what he had with him; when he lost the large sums they were out of his winnings. Talked of some wines ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... learned something about the couple who had preceded us in the use of these rooms. They were of middle age and of great personal elegance but uncertain pay, the husband being nothing more nor less than a professional gambler. Their name was L'Hommedieu. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... "isn't a gambler in the ordinary sense. He never plays cards. Little pictures on paste-board fidget him, he says; he loathes Monte Carlo because it's vulgar, and he dislikes roulette and bridge. He's only a gambler in the best sense of the word—and ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... I have said, was attractive on account of its colour and gentle wistful expression, and being the daughter of a man rich in horses she did not want for lovers. In those far-off days the idle, gay, well-dressed young gambler was always a girl's first and often most successful wooer, but at La Tapera the young lovers had to reckon with one who, incredible as it seemed in a gaucho, hated gambling and kept a hostile and ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... "I am, I hope, a Christian man, but it would be difficult to convince me that the gambler, cattle-thief, and whisky-runner who ruined every man and woman who trusted him will be admitted to the same place as clean-lived English gentlemen. There are, my dear, ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... from Alamo. This man," pointing to the prisoner, "is a gambler who killed a man yesterday. We hunted him here, tried him an hour ago, and found him guilty. The last man we hung here, three years ago, asked for a parson. We brought him the man who used to live where we found you. So we thought we'd give this man the ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... deeds that causes a blush upon the face of a virtuous patriot; so you must be contented with your lot, while crime, cowardice, cupidity or low cunning have handed you down from the high tower of a statesman to the black hole of a gambler . . . . Crape the heavens with weeds of woe; gird the earth with sackcloth, and let hell mutter one melody in commemoration of fallen splendor! For the glory of America has departed, and God will set a flaming sword ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... woman. Neither was sober and the woman fell to the ground. The man kicked her and told her to get up. As she did not comply he cursed her and kicked her again. Then chanced to come along one Ferguson, a gambler and a notoriously "bad man," who bade the other stop abusing the woman, whereupon he was promptly told to go to —— and mind his own business. Ferguson replied that if the other touched the woman again he would shoot him. It was at this point that the altercation ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... particularly artistic, but they are important in a history of the national literature, as noteworthy efforts to present scenes and persons drawn from contemporary life—the first of that sort on the Russian stage—the most remarkable being the one already referred to, and "The Gambler's Name-day" (1772). The personages whom she copied straight from life are vivid; those whom she invented as ideals, as foils for contrast, are lifeless shadows. Her operas are not important. Towards ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... music were interspersed through the line. The orator and distinguished citizens were in carriages, every vehicle in town being brought into requisition. There was a large cavalcade of horsemen. I rode in a handsome buggy, with the principal gambler of the town, and many hundred footmen followed, the Chinamen bringing up the rear. It was a beautiful day, the sun shining brightly. The procession moved off majestically down a back street, off the main thoroughfare, and then turned into the principal street. Every house ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... manipulator of stocks. That means that you are living on the weaknesses of other people, and it almost means that you get your daily bread—yes—and your cake and your wine, too, from the sweat and toil of others. You're a safe gambler, a 'gambler under cover.' Show me a man who's dealing bank; he's free and above board. But you—you can figure the percentage against you, and then if you buck the tiger and get stung, you do it with your eyes open. With you Wall Street men, the game is crooked twelve months of the year. From ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... Blucher, composedly, stroking his long white mustache—"that was really curious. Leesten had never before handled a card; he did not know the game, and yet he won from such an old gambler as I am two hundred louis d'ors in the course of a few hours. Leesten won the money that was to pay for the carriage- horses, and you may give him thanks for being compelled to drive for six months longer with our lame ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... it. And presently that which I waited for came about. His attack began to lag in vigour, and the pressure of his blade to need less resistance, whilst his breathing grew noisy as that of a broken-winded horse. Then with the rage of a gambler who loses at every throw, he cursed and reviled me with every thrust or ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... in essence the belief of the true gambler—not the man who backs his skill at cards, or his knowledge of racing against his rival—but who goes to the tables at Monte Carlo backing runs of good or ill luck. It has been defined as a belief in the imagined tendencies of chance to produce ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... stay there whether there's a dollar bet on him or not. False odds? Certainly, but they're taking no chances on you. They figure you won't be trying at that price. And another thing: This same Squeaking Henry, this marked-card gambler, has gone to work for Goldmark. Three dollars a day for what he can find out. Is this ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... Minister is a case in point. The result is that to the present time no monarch has risen with courage enough, allied to sufficient political acumen, to take his own course, carry it to success. Have you ever realized, monsieur, that Sturatzberg might play with the nations of Europe as a gambler ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... as you sell twenty-four hundred dollars at ninety days to a crook and a gambler like Siegmund Lowenstein, Mawruss," Abe replied, "one cigar more or less won't hurt me. If I can stand a piece of news like that, Mawruss, I guess I can stand anything. Why didn't you give him ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... Cruz, about a Creole having married or run away with a girl of good family there. I am almost certain Dubrosc was the name; but it was before my time, and I am unacquainted with the circumstances, I remember, however, that the fellow was a gambler, or something of the sort; and the occurrence made ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... the duties of the chase, and in a short time afterwards, "luck" being in his favour, he had won back some of his lost possessions. But he was too often in that fluctuating state of alternating excitement and depression which is the invariable accompaniment, in a greater or less degree, of the gambler's sin, whether carried on in the depths of the Arctic wilderness, the well-named "hells" of London, or the gilded ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... thing was certain. A hundred dollars was better than nothing. It would take him to Chicago, and enable him to live in comfort for a while. Besides, he might multiply it many times at the gaming table, for Tom Burns had been a gambler in his day. He certainly did not propose to disdain the sum which fortune had placed in his way simply because it was so small. Oh, no, Tom Burns was not that sort ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... over a picture-frame in the poet's study, and told their sad tale of the little feet that had gone on before. Like Sydney Smith, Lowell learned to think that "children are horribly insecure,—that the life of a parent is the life of a gambler;" and he held the one who still remained to him with a trembling grasp for a long time. Happily, she was spared to him, and still adds interest and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... went on, "he used to be able to stop before doing himself injury. He didn't care what happened to others. But he can't now. The gambler's mania has got hold of him in just the same way that he's lost control of his temper, and he's likely, if he keeps on, to gamble away everything he's got. He liked Mark Fenlow and led him into more evil than just the gambling. But ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... the cross-bowman, the gambler in the song, the Iberian had an arrow for his god when he shattered the grain with hail and ruined the fruits of autumn; and a gloria when he fattened the barley and the oats that were to make bread ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... concerning him, interviews—concocted for the most part in the editorial rooms—were printed. His picture appeared. He was described as a cool, calm man of steel, with a cold and calculating grey eye, "piercing as an eagle's"; as a desperate gambler, bold as a buccaneer, his eye black and fiery—a veritable pirate; as a mild, small man with a weak chin and a deprecatory demeanour; as a jolly and roistering "high roller," addicted to actresses, suppers, and to bathing ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... down at the contorted, blackened face, and his disappointment at having been forestalled, sedimented down. The gambler's features had not been made placid by death; they still held much of the horror of the last moments of that relentless chase, his horse failing under him, foreknowledge of sudden death and then the whistling ropes, the jerk into eternity...! ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... the chance of meeting with significant revelations concerning the private life of Dexter Sprague or Juanita Leigh Selim united by death—in the press, at least. There was much space devoted to the theory involving the two New Yorkers with the murder of the racketeer and gambler, "Swallow-tail Sammy" Savelli, but only two pieces of information held ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... the performance came; and Thyrsis, like a gambler who has staked all his possessions upon the turn of one card, sat in a box and watched the audience and the play. The house was crowded; and the play-wright saw with amazed relief that all his agonies of the night before had been needless—the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... spends half his time trying to keep down the sprouts of seed sown in his young days. Unless it is held in check, the desire to "have a drink" will become a consuming thirst; the desire to "play a game of cards" an irresistible gambler's passion. ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... all,—the frivolity, the recklessness, the half gay, half mournful sense of waste and ruin. There, blooming amongst the wrecks, she saw the fairest flowers of noble manhood profuse and fragrant still,—generosity and courage and disregard for self. Spendthrift and gambler on one side the medal; gentleman and soldier on the other. Beside this maimed and imperfect nature she measured her own prepared and profound intellect, and as she listened, her smile became more bland and frequent. She could afford to be gracious; ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is easily perceived, but that of oneself is difficult to perceive; a man winnows his neighbour's faults like chaff, but his own fault he hides, as a cheat hides the bad die from the gambler. ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... simple," and the voice exhibited a touch of coolness easily perceptible. "I chanced to be somewhat acquainted with this man in the East before—well, before he became a gambler. Of course, I do not know him now, have not the slightest desire to do so, but the sudden information that he was actually here, and—and all the rest—came to me with ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... betteh gambler than to git mad," said Sandy. "I'll jest ask you a question on behalf of myse'f an' partners' twenty-five per cent., an' Molly's twenty-six, me bein' her guardian. Plump an' plain, is the ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... brains to think by what extraordinary combination my mother had gone to Homburg. I knew that my pretty Aunt Rosine had a lady friend there, with whom she stayed every year, for she always spent two months at Homburg, two at Baden-Baden, and one month at Spa, as she was the greatest gambler that the bon Dieu ever created. Anyhow, those who were so dear to me were all well, and that was the important point. But I was nevertheless annoyed with my mother ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... spotted you from the first, and told Flynn I reckoned you were one of those chaps who came back from the mines dead broke. And he up and bought your things for you—like a square man. That's Flynn's style, if he is a gambler." ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of Massena, the sixty millions of Le Clerc, the forty millions of Murat, and the thirty-six millions of Augereau; not to mention the hundred millions of Bonaparte. It is also true that Jourdan is a gambler and a debauchee, fond of cards, dice, and women; and that in Italy, except two hours in twenty-four allotted to business, he passed the remainder of his time either at the gaming-tables, or in the boudoirs of his seraglio—I say seraglio, because he kept, in the extensive ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... ugly little piece of furniture representing the savings of some concierge; it was the first article Jansoulet bought when he was in a position to renounce furnished apartments, and he had kept it ever since like a gambler's fetish; its three drawers always contained two hundred thousand francs in current funds. He resorted to that never-failing supply on the days of his great audiences, ostentatiously plunging his hands in the gold and silver, stuffing it into ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
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