Chapter IV: Part II: “Post tenebras lux.”—Pintsch (2)

[49] Though whist is reported to be an old English word meaning silence, and though it is advisable for many reasons that it should be played with reasonable quiet, it is not at all compulsory to conduct yourself as if in the monastery of La Trappe; you have a perfect right—as far as the laws of whist are concerned—to discuss at any time the price of stocks, the latest scandal, or even the play going on, “provided that no intimation whatever, by word or gesture, be given as to the state of your own hand or the game.”—_Etiquette of Whist._

At bumblepuppy you had better waive this right altogether, for if under any circumstances you open your mouth, you will infallibly put your foot into it. Even here, the bumblepuppist is not consistent, for while constantly laying down the extraordinary law—in a very loud voice—that whist is silence, he considers the carrying out of that law much more incumbent on the rest of the table than himself.

[50] “Avoid playing with those who instruct, or rather find fault while the hand is playing. They are generally unqualified by ignorance, and judge from consequences; but if not, advice while playing does more harm than good.”—_Mathews._

“The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.”—_Shakespeare._

“Talking over the hand _after_ it has been played is not uncommonly called a bad habit and an annoyance, I am firmly persuaded it is one of the readiest ways of learning whist.”—_Clay._

[51]

“O dreary life!” we cry, “O dreary life!”
And still the generation of the birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are keeping strife.

“The education of the whist-player is peculiar. How he becomes a whist-player nobody knows. He never learns his alphabet or the catechism or anything that he ought to do. He appears full-grown, mushroom-like. He remembers someone blowing him up for doing something he ought not to have done, and somebody else blowing him up for doing something else, and he is blown up to the end of the chapter. This phase of being blown up is varied by grumbling sometimes aloud, sometimes _sotto voce_; so that the whist-player is reared on scolding and grumbling as other youngsters are reared on pap. Truly this is a happy life. Some men grumble on principle because it is a national privilege, and they avail themselves of the Englishman’s birthright.”

“A sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies:
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss,
More peevish, cross, and splenetic
Than dog distract, or monkey sick.”—_Hudibras._

“Some do it because they believe that if they grumble enough, it will bring them luck. Some do it in the hope that they will excite sympathy, and that their friends will feel for their ill-fortune, which, by-the-bye, whist-players never do. Some grumble to annoy their friends, and we are bound to say these succeed.”—_Westminster Papers._

“The croaking nuisance lurked in every nook;
And the land stank—so numerous was the fry.”—_Cowper._

[52] “They are intent on some wretched crotchet like the lowest but one.”

“Every time he can lead a lowest but one, no matter what the state of the game or the score, that lead he is sure to make, and we believe there are some neophytes who would lose their money with pleasure if they could only tell their partners afterwards that they had led the lowest but one.”—_Westminster Papers._

[53] “Common sense (which in truth is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of. Abide by it; it will counsel you best.”—_Chesterfield Letters._

[54] This is at first sight a rather appalling proposition, but the advice I give you I have always endeavoured to follow myself, and I am not a solitary case, for in the _Nineteenth Century Review_ for May, 1879, I find the writer of one of the articles is in the same boat; this thoughtful writer—he must have been thoughtful, otherwise his lucubration would not have been accepted—says: “I have given up the practice of thinking, or it may be I never had it.”

LECTURE XI.

——

THINKING.

——

“With some unmeaning thing, that they call thought.”—_Pope._

“Think, and die.”—_Shakespeare._

NEVER think!

Unless you have some remarkably good reason for taking your own course, do as you are told. If your partner leads a small trump, and you win the trick, return it at once:

“Gratia ab officio, quod mora tardat, abest.”

This is a much more simple and satisfactory plan than to proceed to think that he may have no more, or that the fourth player must hold major tenace over him; no one will admit more readily than I do that you are much the better player of the two, still, allow him to have some idea of the state of his own hand.

Don’t think whenever you see a card played that it is necessarily false.—“_Nil sapientiæ odiosius acumine nimio._”—_Seneca._

As, on the whole, true cards are in the majority, you are more likely to be wrong than right, and the betting must be against you in the long run.

“My business and your own is not to inquire
Into such matters, but to mind our cue—
Which is to act as we are bid to do.”—_Byron._

If you are blest with a sufficiently sharp eye to the left, you may occasionally _know_ that a card is false, but knowledge acquired in that way I should not describe as thinking; I should use a quite different expression.

With the military gentleman who anathematized intellect I deeply sympathize. Profound thought about facts which have just taken place under your own eye is the bane of whist.

Why imitate Mark Twain’s fiery steed? Why, when it is your business to go on, “lean your head against something, and think?”

Whether you have seen a thing or not seen it, there can be no necessity for thought; recondite questions—such as whether the seven is the best of a suit of which all the others but the six are out, or whether a card is the twelfth or thirteenth—can be answered by a rational being in one of two ways, and two only; either he knows, or he does not know, there is no _tertium quid_; the curious practice of gazing intently at the chandelier and looking as intelligent as nature will permit—if not more so—though it is less confusing than going to the last trick for information, and imposes upon some people, is no answer at all;[55] this, in whist circles, is called, or miscalled, _thinking_. It is not a new invention, for it has been known and practised from the earliest times. “There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes; and their eyelids are lifted up.”—_Proverbs, chap._ 30, _verse_ 13, B.C. 1,000. Pecksniff, who had an extensive acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, knew it; you and all other schoolboys are adepts at it.

In Greek the very name of man—ανθρωπος—was derived from this peculiar method of feigning intelligence, and it was by no means unknown to the Romans.

“Pronaque cum spectent animalia cœtera terram,
Os homini sublime dedit cœlumque tueri.”

But, however ancient and venerable the practice may be, it is one of those numerous practices more honoured in the breach than in the observance; surely, looking on the table is more in accordance with the dictates of common sense than attempting to eliminate unknown quantities from a chandelier. In the one you have gas and probably water; on the other—lying open before you—the data required. I have now endeavoured, not to teach you either whist or bumblepuppy, but to point out a few of the differences between them, and to start you on the right road. The first is a game of reason and common sense, played in combination with your partner; the second is a game of inspiration, haphazard, and absurdity, where your partner is your deadliest enemy. I have made a few extracts from Mathews—partly because I do not like novelties merely because they are novelties—partly to convince the bumblepuppist (if anything will convince him) that when he tells me the recognised plan is a new invention, introduced by Cavendish for his especial annoyance, he does not know what he is talking about; and partly to show you that since that book was written—eighty years ago—the main principles of Whist are almost unaltered.

The chapter on etiquette is since his time; but, although the game has been cut down one-half, take away from Mathews his slight partiality for sneakers—to be accounted for by the possibility of his partner at that remote period being even a more dangerous lunatic than yours is at present, and the consequent necessity for playing more on the defensive (for leading singletons, whatever else it may do, and however it may damage the firm, does not injure the leader)[56] take away from the play of to-day its signal, its echo, and its penultimate of a long suit; (all excrescences of doubtful advantage for general purposes, and the last two more adapted to that antediluvian epoch when human life was longer)—and the continuity of the game is clear.[57] Whether Whist would gain anything by their omission I am unable to say; the attention, now always on the strain in _looking_ for its accidents, would have a spare moment or two to devote to its essentials; whether it would do anything of the kind is another matter.

Those followers of Darwin and believers in the doctrine of evolution, to whom it is a source of comfort that an ascidian monad and not Eve was their first parent, must find the Whist table rather a stumbling block: they will there see uncommonly few specimens of the survival of the fittest. A cynic with whom I was once conversing on this subject, remarked that they were much more likely to come across the missing link.

The philosopher of Chelsea long since arrived at the unsatisfactory and sweeping conclusion, that the population of these islands are mostly fools, and he has made no exception of the votaries of Whist. Still, it has the reputation of being a very pretty game, though this reputation must be based to a great extent on conjecture; for apart from its other little peculiarities—on some of which I have briefly touched—its features are so fearfully disfigured by bumblepuppy, that it is as difficult to give a positive opinion as to say whether a woman suffering from malignant small-pox might or might not be good looking under happier circumstances. The sublime self-confidence expressed in the distich—

“When I see thee as thou art,
I’ll praise thee as I ought,”

has not been vouchsafed to me, but if ever I obtain a clear view of it, I will undertake to report upon it to the best of my ability.

You may have heard that if you are ignorant of Whist you are preparing for yourself a miserable old age: it is by no means certain that a knowledge of it—as practised at this particular period—is to be classed with the beatitudes.

FOOTNOTES:

[55] Making passes in the air with your hand, as if you were about to mesmerise the table, is another favourite stratagem.

[56] The difference here is more apparent than real; Mathews, with considerable limitations, advocates leading singletons; now-a-days the practice is decried, but I regret to say that as far as my experience goes, the principal obstacle to leading a singleton is not having a singleton to lead.

[57] “We expect that Cavendish very often must have objected to that ancient plagiarist Mathews for stealing his ideas.”

“If their ideas are not identical, it is rather difficult to find where one begins and the other ends.”—_Westminster Papers._

“I contend that there is no essential difference between modern and old-fashioned whist, _i.e._, between Hoyle and Cavendish, Mathews and J. C.”—_Mogul._

LECTURE XII.

——

TEMPER.

——

“O tempora! O mores!”

“To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but a bravery of
the Stoics.”—_Bacon._

I AM afraid that you will hear at the whist table a good deal about temper, unless you are particularly fortunate; that so-and-so is good-tempered, or the reverse; that if we were all better tempered, something or other might be different, and similar platitudes. Now these mostly start on the utterly false assumption that everybody is equally subject to the same annoyances.

“Tender and delicate persons must needs be oft angry;
they have so many things to trouble them, which more
robust natures have little sense of.”—_Ibid._

That the greatest exponent of Bumblepuppy has necessarily the longest temper goes without saying—of course he has! He has nothing to ruffle him, for he has everything his own way; he plays as he thinks fit (supposing him to think at all, or ever to be fit); if his partner makes a mistake it is any odds he never sees it; _de non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem est ratio_; here is one cause of equanimity.

If it is any amusement to him—and I presume it is, otherwise he would not do it—from his cradle to his grave to play a game of which he knows absolutely nothing, and if in pursuit of that amusement he thinks it worth his while to take a certain amount of his own and his partner’s capital, and to throw it in the street, why should he lose his temper? Although he has paid his money, he has had his choice—another cause of equanimity.

Ah Sin played a game he did not understand, and remained quite calm and unperturbed, though he was a heathen and an Asiatic; while his antagonist disgraced our common Christianity by letting his angry passions rise because things were going against him.

If both partners, then, are of the same mind and the same calibre—either bad or good—to quote an American author, “all is peas,” and like the place

“Where brothers dwell and sisters meet
Quarrels should never come.”

The difficulty begins to arise when one of the partners fails to see things altogether in the same light as the other. He may be so unfortunately constituted (cross-grained the other would say) that he is unable to derive any amusement from the game unless it is played with a modicum of intelligence; it is just possible that instead of considering gold as dross, as an accursed thing to be got rid of at the earliest opportunity, he may be actuated by a depraved love of filthy lucre, and a sordid desire for gain; such conditions are to be deplored, but they exist and must be reckoned with.

When his partner proceeds to run amuck, he misses the point of the joke; his perverted moral sense revolts against paying half the money, and the other man having all the choice; probably, for a time, he keeps his mouth tightly shut, but his _collaborateur_ is not to be eluded in that way; he demands not merely the passive, but the active assent of his victim, and sooner or later, after the perpetration of some particularly atrocious _coup_, inquires with the bland and childlike smile of the heathen already referred to, “Partner, I think we could not have done better there?” What is to be done now? Silence is not an answer; it used to be, but has been disestablished. Are you to agree with him? Are you to state what is false? Are you to dissent and be informed you are always finding fault? (Shakespeare’s retort is neat and worthy of him: “You have always been called a merciful man, partner;” but we are not all Shakespeares.) Or is it the best course at once to resort to active measures, and throw at him the first thing that comes to hand?

The worm must turn some time or other; it may turn the other cheek, but that is only temporising; no worm has more than two cheeks, and when it has had them both slapped, what is it to do then? We come to an _impasse_.

The copy-books used to tell us—for anything I know they may do so yet—copy-book aphorisms have a marvellous vitality, and you have seen them since I have—that “patience is a virtue” (I think virtue ought to have a capital V), and, as an abstract proposition, the statement is probably as true and more grammatical than “There’s milestones on the Dover Road”; but what is the use of it? The question is, will it wash? The two best known examples of this virtue are the Patriarch Job and the patient ass. Whether the Patriarch was well advised in enduring his friends so long, and whether he endured them on account of his patience, or whether the bodily affliction from which he was notoriously suffering at the time, incapacitated him from taking energetic steps to expel them from his bed-room, are questions difficult to decide so long after the event. I express no opinion of my own; let the dead past bury its dead: _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_; but the donkey is a different matter; he lives in our own times, and I know him well; he touches me nearly; and I unhesitatingly affirm that the only benefit—if benefit is the proper term—he has ever derived from his long-suffering, has been to be invariably imposed upon in consequence. Casa Bianca on the burning deck is another case in point; he did score to a certain extent, for owing to his patience his widowed mother escaped an undertaker’s bill, while he himself is known to this day in the nursery as “the noble boy”; but to the more mature observer, in whom the ambition to be called names is dead, the game is hardly worth the candle; while you yourselves will be called quite enough names at the whist table without being cremated; not to mention that the majority of you probably prefer pudding to praise.

Some irritable people go so far as to apply language of a condemnatory character to the inanimate cards; as it is impossible to arouse any emotion either of pleasure or anger in their breasts, this seems absurd and a waste of energy. It must be bad form to excite yourself without causing annoyance to others, and should certainly be avoided.

Believing luck to be strictly personal, it appears to me that calling for new cards is an unnecessary display of temper and throwing good money after bad.

We may take it, speaking generally—for it is not always the case—that the worse a man plays, the less visible is his bad temper; the converse fortunately does not hold good, for many good players have really wonderful tempers.

One curious circumstance is that want of perception and thickness of mental cuticle are usually looked upon by the unfortunate possessors as proofs of good temper, and boasted of as such. This is not the case in other afflictions. I once knew a man with a Barbadoes leg, and though its circumference much exceeded that of mine, he never made any offensive comparisons.

In Bath I have seen scores of invalids—mostly naval and military men, naturally warlike—they were all seated decorously in the local chairs; and when they dismounted and hobbled into the club, they did not go about brandishing their crutches and bragging that they had refrained from assaulting us innocent civilians; on the contrary, I always found them most courteous and friendly.

To sum up the matter; we are all worms of some kind, and we all turn more or less when we are trodden upon, if we perceive it. The denser the worm, the more slowly he turns. While some ill-conditioned ones turn under all circumstances, some of the most highly-organised are scarcely ever known even to wriggle. Apparently harmless ones sometimes turn most suddenly and ferociously. Those most trodden upon—unless quite _hors de combat_—turn most.

Finally, many congenitally mal-formed worms, and worms suffering from amaurosis, cerebral ramollissement, myxædema, and other dreadful diseases, are not only unaware of their critical state, but are actually proud of it, and look upon it as a proof of their amiable disposition.

LECTURE XIII.

——

DETERIORATION OF WHIST, ITS CAUSES AND CURE.

——

“Past and to come seem best; things present worst.”—_Shakespeare._

IN my time I believe Whist has on the whole deteriorated,[58] it mistakes means for ends, is more tricky, more difficult, more cantankerous; with regard to common mistakes—inability to hold a few cards without dropping them on the table, or to play them one at a time; inability to count thirteen, to recollect the best card, or whether it was your opponents, your partner, or yourself who first led a suit; winning your partner’s trick, or not winning your adversary’s; leading out of turn, revoking, and so on—there is not much difference.

As long as I can recollect, Whist has been gorged with these, and neither the hydraulic ram nor any other of the improved mechanical appliances of the present day can squeeze into a thing more than it will hold. Architects of card-rooms are to blame for a good deal of this bad Whist; it is impossible to play in a badly lighted, or a badly ventilated room. Whist players have often told me exactly what they require, and it is very odd they cannot have it.

With a large fire, the room hermetically sealed, and everybody smoking, the temperature should never exceed sixty-one-and-a-half degrees, nor be below sixty. There must be neither doors (they admit draughts) nor windows: windows are open—allow me to withdraw that offensive word—windows are exposed to two objections, (1) some scoundrel, regardless of consequences, might lower or raise the sash; (2) instead of being placed in the ceiling or the floor—where you would naturally expect to find them—they are always at the side of the room, and no whist player can see a card with the windows in such a position.

Candles do not give sufficient light, and gas is unbearable; a suggestion to try an attic with a skylight fell through (not through the skylight—I mean the suggestion failed), because no one was able to go upstairs; a lift would overcome that objection, but the temperature difficulty remained.

This only applies to clubs; curiously enough, in small stuffy back-rooms in private houses, gas never causes head-ache, and neither a mephitic atmosphere nor a temperature of 120° is at all disagreeable.

Joking apart, the _fons et origo mali_ is Law 91, and not only the head and front of the offending, but its barrel and hind quarters as well.[59]

Since the introduction of signalling, the subsequent petrolatry, and all the elaborate functions of that cultus, an exaggerated importance (increasing in geometric ratio with every additional convention) has been attached to the last trick—the only place where, by universal consent, anything can reasonably be “looked for”—and if you, after seeing the cards played, informing your partner which is yours (of course, in answer to his enquiry), gathering the trick and arranging it neatly, should imagine you have done with it, you will be the victim of a fond delusion—using “fond” in the old acceptation of the word. First, your partner will ask to see it at least twice, then your opponents, one or both, will probably grab at it without asking, and put it back in a dishevelled condition; it is useless to specify what their mental state must be, and unfortunately, by the time all these irritating performances have been gone through and you have again arranged the trick symmetrically, you will find yours is not all you could wish. You can avoid some of these annoyances by allowing your partner to gather the tricks, but from his slovenly mode of doing so, you will never be able to see how many he has; and just as you are endeavouring to concentrate your attention at a critical point, it will be distracted by your having to make an intricate calculation how the game stands, the data being the cards remaining in your hand, and two confused heaps on the table; as long as this is permitted, whist is out of the question, and you feel inclined to say with the Divine Williams,

“Let him have a table by himself.”

One of the principal uses of the new method of suspended animation will turn out to be, that all decent whist players will have to submit themselves to it, and remain, arranged in rows on shelves, until that law is abrogated.

The number of shelves required will not appreciably affect the timber trade.[60]

In the good time coming, promised by the poet to those of you who wait a little longer, when the present inspired, convention-ridden, and last-trick-inspecting generation is in the silent tomb or cremated, as the case may be, and a new school—basing its play on common sense and attention—has arisen, there may be an improvement; but as I am not an optimist I cannot join in the aspiration of the little girl whose world was hollow and whose doll was stuffed with sawdust; therefore, though this improvement, like the millennium, may be looming in the more or less remote future, I see no sign of it at present.

If “to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the sun,” also “_a time to lose and a time to cast away_.”—Ecclesiastes, chap. 1, verse 1-6: it seems clear to me there must be a time for bumblepuppy.

Some people deny this, they say that the argument proves too much; they point out that Shakespeare says there are

“Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

and that as this could not apply to bumblepuppy, these passages only show that it was unknown when they were written.

Another argument of theirs against the antiquity of bumblepuppy, based on the passage “in all labour there is profit,” is altogether fallacious and unworthy of consideration; they admit the labour but deny the profit. This must have had its origin east of Temple Bar, where it is held there is no profit unless it assumes a pecuniary form. But the repressing your innate tendency to profane swearing, curbing your evil passions generally, and the cultivation—under considerable difficulties—of nearly all the cardinal virtues, as inuring to your moral well-being, are a profit of the most positive kind;[61] to be able to give a definite answer to the long-standing conundrum “is life worth living?” is something.

However, you can draw your own conclusion, the extract from Shakespeare is—I confess—difficult to get over, still, when Solomon makes use of these remarkable words “a time to lose and a time to cast away,” I fail to see what he could have had in his mind, unless it was this very game.

At any rate one thing is clear, bumblepuppy exists now, and is not a pretty game (there can be no two opinions about that); neither—judging from the demeanour and language of its exponents—is it a pleasant game. I append a hand, which is, I think, the finest specimen of it I ever saw. Judge for yourself. I had jotted down a few further remarks on this repulsive subject, but on reading them over, they seem to be not only inconsistent with that extreme reverence which is due to the young, but absolutely unfit for publication.

“Quod factu fœdum est, idem est et dictu turpe.”
R. I. P.

The two games are now before you, let me conclude the lecture with one more extract from my favourite classic.

Utrum horum mavis accipe.

* * * * *

SPECIMEN OF BUMBLEPUPPY IN EXCELSIS.

“Here’s a pretty state of things! Here’s a how-de-do!”

Score love all. Trumps diamond 9. Z is a bumblepuppist with the highest opinion of himself.

A. Y. B. Z.

1 H5 ~H6~ H2 H4

2 D2 D5 D4 ~DK~!

3 S3 SK ~SA~ S4!!

4 S7 SJ S2 ~SQ~

5 D8 ~D10~ S10 S9!!!

6 D3 D7 D6 ~DQ~!!!!

7 C3 DJ ~DA~ D9!!!!!

8 C4 H8 ~S8~ C2

9 C6 C8 ~S6~ C9

10 C7 HQ ~S5~ CJ

11 H10 ~HA~ H3 H9

12 H8 ~CA~ C5 CK

13 HJ ~CQ~ C10 HK

This is the worst hand ever played, without exception; it is a microcosm, complete in itself, and contains examples of stupidity, selfishness, duplicity, defiance of all recognized principles, and every conceivable villainy.

Trick 2.—The misplaced ingenuity in deceiving Y as to the position of the Qn is worth notice.

Trick 3.—The lead of the only weak suit, in preference to the strong suit of clubs, playing up to declared weakness in hearts, or returning the trump is very neat.

Trick 5.—The force here of the trump leader, inducing him to believe that Z at any rate holds the remaining spades, an illusion carefully fostered by B, is especially good.

Trick 7.—The return of the trump at this point with the best trump (probably) and three long spades (certainly) declared against him in one hand, is a real gem.

THE DOMESTIC RUBBER.

“Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the
fool nowhere but in his own house.”—_Shakespeare._

A third variety of whist, the domestic rubber, I have passed over in silence; what takes place in the sanctity of private life it would be as unbecoming for me to divulge as for you to seek to know;

“O’er all its faults we draw a tender veil,
So great its sorrows and so sad its tale.”

At the same time I don’t think I am violating any confidence in stating that you will find there neither signalling, nor the penultimate of five and its developments: yet, though free from these annoyances, the game, even when mitigated by muffins, music, and the humanizing influence of woman is inexpressibly dreary, and you had better keep out of it if you can; but should this not be practicable,—for some relative from whom you have a reasonable expectation of a tip may be staying in the house, and you may be compelled to sacrifice yourself either on the altar of duty or of self-interest—then never forget that sweetness of temper is much more important here than knowledge of Whist, and consoling yourself with the following two reflections:

(1) That (according to Epicurus) prolonged pain is pleasant rather than otherwise, extreme pain always short;[62]

(2) That those whom the gods love die young; when your hour arrives, bare your throat to the knife with a smile.

So shall your memory smell sweet and blossom in domestic circles.

DOUBLE DUMMY.

Double dummy is not Whist, nor anything like it, it much more closely resembles chess; one is a game of inference, the other is an exact science, where the position of every card is known.

Often, in the course of a controversy on Whist, you will hear one of the disputants challenging the other to play double dummy, imagining that he has clenched the matter; it would be quite as germane to suggest trial by battle, or to move an adjournment to a good dry skittle alley.

“The bearings of these observations lays in the application of them. That an’t no part of my duty. Avast then, keep a bright look out for’ard, and good luck to you.”

FOOTNOTES:

[58] “The game is not the simple straightforward game it was, it is more erratic and more difficult.”

“Whist is more and more, and year by year, a game of brag, a game for gambling, a game in which we have to study the idiosyncrasies of the players as well as the cards themselves. We have to deduce from imperfect data, and when our inference is wrong we have a great chance of a scolding from an infuriated partner.”

“Modern whist in a nutshell—signs and signals and a short supply of brains.”—_Westminster Papers._

“We are by no means peculiar in the opinion that signals and the so-called developments are destroying whist.”—_Cornhill Magazine._

“Whist, as a game, is in a fair way of being ruined.”—_Knowledge._

[59] “Let players, if they wish to play a decent game, and avoid a mischievous and annoying practice, give up the privilege accorded by Law 91.”—_Home Whist._

[60] “This refuge against boredom has fallen through. Seeing an article on suspended animation in the _Contemporary Review_ for November 1879, I pounced upon it, thinking it might contain the recipe, and found to my disgust that the process, so circumstantially narrated, was a hoax.”

[61] “While practising these virtues you are not obliged to look pleasant unless you feel so—this would be dissimulation. Heine’s plan fulfils all reasonable requirements.

Once I said in my despairing,
This must break my spirit now,
But I bore it and am bearing,
Only do not ask me how.”

[62] He is right to some extent; the domestic rubber always closes early.