"Buy nuts from me."
"What do you mean by saying I should buy nuts off you?"
"Fool! Don't you know what buying means? Give me money, and I'll give you nuts. Eh?"
"Well, I agree to that."
He took from his purse a silver coin, bargained about the price, counted a score of nuts from the right-hand pocket to the left, and the play began all over again.
An experienced card-player, the story goes, half an hour before his death called his son—also a gambler—to his bedside, and said to him:
"My child, I am going from this world. We shall never meet again. I know you play cards. You have my nature. You may play as much as you like, only take care not to play yourself out."
These words are almost a law. There is nothing worse in the world than playing yourself out. Experienced people say it deprives a man even of his last shirt. It drives a man to desperate acts. And one cannot hope to rise at the Resurrection after that. So people say. And so it happened with our young man. He worked so long, shaking his cap, "odd or even," taking from one pocket and putting into the other, until his left-hand pocket hadn't a single nut in it.
"Well, why don't you play?"
"I have nothing to play with."