If you must look for it, at any rate don’t look for it in the last trick; you would scarcely look for the Boat Race as you were going to church the next day. Still, Cowper—though he clearly disapproves of the signal and calls it senseless—seems, if he is to be annoyed with it, to advocate this—
“’Tis well if look’d for at so late a day
In the last scene of such a senseless play.”
What the signal for trumps ought to be, and what strength in trumps justifies a signal are clearly laid down by Clay.
If you see a call and hold the ace and any number of trumps, play the ace—there can be no danger of dropping your partner’s king—and if you had originally more than three, continue with the lowest; but if you are quite sure that leading trumps is the only way to miss or lose the game, don’t lead them at all. Often as, in obedience to my partner’s call, I slam in an ace and play my best trump, Elaine’s despairing cry rises to my lips,—
“Call and I follow, I follow, let me die.”
This important fact is too much lost sight of: that the object of Whist is not so much to lead the lowest but one of five, or to signal, as to win the game; these and other fads may or may not be means to that end, but the end itself they emphatically are not; in their inception, at any rate, they were intended to be your instruments. Don’t let this position be reversed; whether, like fire, they are always good servants may be open to argument, but their resemblance in the other respect is perfect.
One aspect of signalling has been overlooked in all the treatises on Whist. I have seen a player of great common-sense and acute observation signal having three small trumps and a short suit, and by this means induce his watchful opponents to force him to make them all. I do not recommend such devious courses to you, even if they are lawful in a Christian country (of which I have doubts); they are only practicable when you are playing very good Whist, and this, as Clay says, can only be the case when you thoroughly know your men.
Hair-splitting about the legitimacy of the Peter is beyond the scope of these remarks; what is lawful is not necessarily expedient: this the Apostle Paul pointed out, long before either the foundations of New Orleans were laid, or Columbus discovered America; but when Professor Pole—who appears to have been acquainted with the present mode of signalling for forty years (Fortnightly Review, April, 1879), and for nine has advised learners with five trumps always to ask for them (Theory of Whist, page 65)—begins at this eleventh hour to find fault with the practice, and to have his suspicions that it is immoral; this is the Gracchi complaining of sedition with a vengeance.
“A merciful Providence fashioned him holler,