I was persuaded to learn more of it. I played the thing at first, to be
sure, as I have noticed that novices always do, with a mind so bent upon
"getting it" that I was insensible of its curative and refining
agencies.
"You haven't the secret yet," said my mentor, who watched me as I won
for the first time, and was moved to warn me by my unconcealed pride in
this achievement. "After you've played it a few years, you'll learn that
the value of it lies chiefly in losing. You'll try like the devil to
win, of course, but you'll learn not to wish for it. To win is nothing
but an endless piling up of the right cards, beginning with the ace and
ending with the king, and it only means more shuffling for next time.
But every time you lose you will learn things about everything."
It was even as he said,--it took me years to learn this true merit of
the game; and still, as he had said, I learned much from it of life.
There is a fine moment at the last shuffling of the cards, a moment when
free will and fatalism are indistinguishably merged.
I am ready to lay down eight cards in a horizontal row off my double
deck. Who will say that the precise number of shuffles I have given to
it was preordained?
"I do," exclaimed an obliging fatalist.
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