Read it through once

“One day”—her own description of the event is so expressive and circumstantial—“he took me into a not very tempting-looking place, which was, as I speedily found, a lottery-office. It was my birthday, and I was ten years old. An Irish lottery was upon the point of being drawn, and he desired me to choose one out of several bits of printed paper (I did not then know their significance) that lay upon the counter.