Page:California Inter Pocula.djvu/734



creator of the universe begging of the devil a few dollars to help build a church!

It was in Sacramento in the winter of '49-50, and the man was a well-known baptist clergyman. Passing a gambling shop and hearing the chink of the much desired metal, he entered, approached a table, and made known his want to a man with an open pleasing face, who was busy bucking at the tiger.

'Church, oh yes! People want churches as well as gambling houses. How much do you want ? "

"Whatever you choose to give," blandly replied the preacher.

"Well, you see the twenty on that card. If it wins it's forty, and it's yours."

It won and the preacher took the forty dollars from the courts of Belial to give it to his God.

"Hold on," exclaimed the gambler, " I have a ten on that other card. You may have that," It won; and the preacher desired to be off. "Stop a minute," cried the man of sin. "Put your sixty dollars on that card, and you'll have a hundred and twenty sure, and if you'll stand by me we'll win enough to build the whole damned concern."

"Who do you belong to?" asked a passenger of a colored boy on the Sacramento boat bomid down in 1850.

"Don't know, sir," was the reply.

"Why don't you know ?"

"Well, when I come aboard, I b'long to mass Sam White, but he went me on two little par, and de clerk ob dis boat he win me. Den Kernel Smiff he beat de clerk on a bluff, and he had me last; so I can't tell who I b'longs to till the game closes."

Many a man has fancied in vain that he has or can devise a system by which he can surely win in the long run, "One of the marvels of San Francisco," says an Enolish adventurer, " is its instant transformation