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.

"The sequence of every one of those cards was determined when we were yet star-dust." I bring confusion to him by performing half a dozen other shuffles.

I am thus far the master of my unborn game--another last shuffle to prove it, though I shuffle clumsily enough.
I glance disdainfully at the fatalist whom I have refuted, and prepare again to lay down the first row of cards.

But the fellow comes back with, "Those last shuffles were also determined, as was this challenge--" "Very well!" and I prepare for still another rearrangement.