Four months ago I got reckless enough to plank $10 on the counter of the little shop, which, at the corner of the Escolta and the Puente de España, is said to dispense the largest number of winning tickets, and became the owner of number 1700. It sounded too even, too commonplace, to be lucky, but as it was considered unlucky to change a ticket once handed you, I trudged off and locked the paper in the safe. The drawing came, and 1700 drew $100. Fortune seemed bound my way, so I made arrangements (as so many buyers of lucky tickets do) to keep 1700 every month. My name was put in the paper as holding 1700, and for three long months I remembered to send my servant to the Government office ten days before the drawing, for the ticket reserved in my name. But for three drawings it never tempted fortune. Last week I forgot lottery and everything else in our further straggle with a new piece of American machinery which was being introduced for the first time to Manila, and woke up to-day to find it the occasion of the drawing. My ticket--uncalled for--had been sold. At noon I walked by the little tienda whose proprietor had first given me the fatal number, to see him perched up on a step-ladder, posting up the big prizes, as fast as they came to his wife by telephone. The space opposite the first prize of $80,000 was empty. His wife handed him a paper. Into the grooves he slid a figure 1, then a 7, and then two ciphers. Ye gods--my ticket! The capital prize--not mine! $80,000 lost because I forgot--and to think that the whole sum would have been paid in hard, jingling coin, for which I should have had to send a dray or two! But I am not quite so inconsolable as my friends the two Englishmen, who kept their ticket for two years, and at last, discouraged, sold it, Christmas-eve, to a native clerk, only to wake up next day and find it had drawn $100,000. They have never been the same since. Nor have I.
And the machine that caused all the trouble--another whim of our rich friend, the owner of the fire-engine, who saw from the catalogues on our office table that American cigarette-machines could turn out 125,000 pieces a day against some 60,000, the capacity of the French mechanisms, which were in use in all the great factories in Manila. He wanted one for his friend that ran the little tobacco-mill up in a back street, for whom he furnished the capital. If it worked, he was in the market for two dozen more, and vowed to knock spots out of the big Compañía General and Fábrica Insular.