Presently, by the merest chance, he executed a marvelous stroke.  Waiting till the astonished balls had resumed their composure, he gathered them up, replacing them in their former position.  He tried the stroke again, and, naturally, did not make it.  Again he placed the balls, and again he badly failed.  With a vexed and humilated air he once more put the indocile globes into position, leaned over the table and was upon the point of striking, when there sounded a solemn voice from behind: 

“Bet you two bits you don’t make it!”

Mr. Jarvis erected himself; he turned about and looked at the speaker, whom he found to be a stranger—­one that most persons would prefer should remain a stranger.  Mr. Jarvis made no reply.  In the first place, he was a man of aristocratic taste, to whom a wager of “two bits” was simply vulgar.  Secondly, the man who had proffered it evidently had not the money.  Still it is annoying to have one’s skill questioned by one’s social inferiors, particularly when one has doubts of it oneself, and is otherwise ill-tempered.  So Mr. Jarvis stood his cue against the table, laid off his fashionable morning-coat, resumed his stick, spread his fine figure upon the table with his back to the ceiling and took deliberate aim.

At this point Mr. Jarvis drops out of this history, and is seen no more forever.  Persons of the class to which he adds lustre are sacred from the pen of the humorist; they are ridiculous but not amusing.  So now we will dismiss this uninteresting young aristocrat, retaining merely his outer shell, the fashionable morning-coat, which Mr. Stenner, the gentleman, who had offered the wager, has quietly thrown across his arm and is conveying away for his own advantage.

An hour later Mr. Stenner sat in his humble lodgings at North Beach, with the pilfered garment upon his knees.  He had already taken the opinion of an eminent pawnbroker on its value, and it only remained to search the pockets.  Mr. Stenner’s notions concerning gentlemen’s coats were not so clear as they might have been.  Broadly stated, they were that these garments abounded in secret pockets crowded with a wealth of bank notes interspersed with gold coins.  He was therefore disappointed when his careful quest was rewarded with only a delicately perfumed handkerchief, upon which he could not hope to obtain a loan of more than ten cents; a pair of gloves too small for use and a bit of paper that was not a cheque.  A second look at this, however, inspired hope.  It was about the size of a flounder, ruled in wide lines, and bore in conspicuous characters the words, “Western Union Telegraph Company.”  Immediately below this interesting legend was much other printed matter, the purport of which was that the company did not hold itself responsible for the verbal accuracy of “the following message,” and did not consider itself either morally or legally bound to forward or deliver it, nor, in short, to render any kind of service for the money paid by the sender.