There are several _=card games=_ with dominoes, but they are little used, and hardly worth description in a work of this kind. DICE. Dice are probably the oldest gambling instruments in the world. Chatto thinks that man acquired the passion for gambling as soon as he could distinguish odd from even, or a short straw from a shorter. Simple gambling instruments were probably very early articles of manufacture, and Chatto says that it is not unlikely that after a simple dinner of mutton some enterprising gamester may have taken the small bones from between the shank and the foot, and after burning spots in them to distinguish one from the other, put them into _a_ cow’s horn and shaken them up, afterward rolling them upon the ground. From some such beginning Astragali was developed, a game which Dr. Thomas Hyde thinks was known at the time of the Deluge. Later on, other instruments were used in connection with dice, and so the earliest forms of Backgammon were developed. Dice are still the favourite implements for deciding any matters of pure chance, such as raffling off a horse or a gold watch; but the rules governing such lotteries are but imperfectly understood by people in general. There are also a number of smaller matters, such as the payment for refreshments or cigars, which are settled by thousands of persons every day, simply by throwing dice.
_, the buds or young leaves of what later is called May (_Cratægus oxyacantha_); and at line six she is taken up under the blinded girl s arm and swung round.--Warwickshire (_Notes and Queries_, 6th Ser., viii. 451). Gilty-galty (or gaulty) A boy s game. One boy is chosen, who says:-- Gilty-galty four-and-forty, Two tens make twenty. He then counts one, two, three, four, &c., up to forty, having his eyes covered by his hands, and the others hide while he is saying the nominy. At the conclusion he uncovers his eyes, and if he sees any boys not yet hidden they have to stand still. He seeks the rest, but if he moves far away from his place, called the stooil (stool), one of the hidden boys may rush out and take it, provided he can get there first.
W. R. Carse. ISLE OF MAN Mr. A. W. Moore. ISLE OF WIGHT-- Cowes Miss E. Smith. KENT Pegge s _Alphabet of Kenticisms_.
It was funny how it was possible to do two things at once. He could scan space with his pin-set mind and yet at the same time catch a vagrant thought of hers, a lovely, affectionate thought about a son who had had a golden face and a chest covered with soft, incredibly downy white fur. While he was still searching, he caught the warning from her. _We jump again!_ And so they had. The ship had moved to a second planoform. The stars were different. The Sun was immeasurably far behind. Even the nearest stars were barely in contact. This was good Dragon country, this open, nasty, hollow kind of space. He reached farther, faster, sensing and looking for danger, ready to fling the Lady May at danger wherever he found it.
Bath seems to have been the great rallying-point for the whist-players of the last century; but the passion for the game soon spread all over Europe. In 1767 Benjamin Franklin went to Paris, and it is generally believed that he introduced the American variety of the game known as Boston, which became the rage in Paris some time after the war of independence. So popular did whist become in Italy that we find the boxes at the opera in Florence provided with card tables in 1790. The music of the opera was considered of value chiefly as, “increasing the joy of good fortune, and soothing the affliction of bad.” A code of laws was drawn up about 1760 by the frequenters of White’s and Saunders’ in London. These seem to have remained the standard until “Cælebs” published, in 1851, the code in use at the Portland Club. In 1863 John Loraine Baldwin got together a committee at the Arlington, now the Turf Club, and they drew up the code which is still in use all over the world for English whist. In the United States, laws better suited to the American style of play were drawn up by the American Whist League in 1891, and after several revisions were finally adopted, in 1893, as the official code for League clubs. The literature of whist saw its palmiest days at the beginning of this century. 7,000 copies of Bob Short’s “Short Rules for Whist” were sold in less than a year.
No trump is turned. In Two-handed Hearts, the dealer stops when each player has received thirteen cards. The deal passes to the left. _=Misdealing.=_ It is a misdeal if the dealer omits to have the pack cut, and the error is discovered before the last card is dealt; if he deals a card incorrectly, and does not remedy the error before dealing another; or if he counts the cards on the table, or those remaining in the pack; or if it is discovered before all have played to the first trick that any player has too many or too few cards. A misdeal loses the deal unless one of the other players has touched the cards, or has in any way interrupted the dealer. If any card is exposed by the dealer, the player to whom it is dealt may demand a new deal, provided he has not touched any of his cards. Any one dealing out of turn, or with the wrong cards, may be stopped before the last card is dealt. After that the deal stands good, and the packs, if changed, must so remain. _=IRREGULAR HANDS.