In a New York Gambling-House
by Stephen Sutcliffe

In those elegant fictitious biographies which our ancestors used to write, the hero was never considered properly ingratiated into the reader's sympathies until he had spent an evening, at least, in a gaming-house, and had come away more or less crumpled and despoiled. Now, a great deal has been said on this same subject in New York, during recent months, and one establishment of the sort - which we will call Danfield's, because that is not precisely its name - has come in for a special degree of public notoriety. Hence it occurred to me that the seeker after truth, if he has never made the excursion before, might find it both instructive and amusing to pass that somber mahogany portal with the green marble pillars on each side of it, and enter in among the lights and the glitter, and the spinning roulette wheels with the tense, silent faces grouped about them.