If your pocket money gives out, or you feel that your cards are too bad for endurance, give up playing altogether; but if you continue to play don’t exacerbate your misfortunes by your own shortcomings; it is bad enough to retire to your crib with empty pockets, without a guilty conscience in addition.
LECTURE X.
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ON THINGS IN GENERAL.
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“‘The time has come,’ the walrus said,
To talk of many things.’”
To become a fair whist-player[46] no wonderful attributes are required; common sense, a small amount of knowledge—easily acquired—ordinary observation of facts as they occur, and experience, the result of that observation—not the experience obtained by repeating the same idiotic mistakes year after year—are about all. To save you trouble, the experience of all the best players for the last hundred years has been collected into a series of maxims, which you will find in any whist book. These maxims you should know,[47] but though you know every maxim that ever was written, and are “bland, passionate, deeply religious, and also paint beautifully in water-colours,” if among your other virtues the power of assimilating facts as they occur is not included, this will not avail you in the least.
Bumblepuppy—according to its own account—demands much more superfine qualities, e.g., inspiration, second-sight, instinct, an intuitive perception of false cards and singletons, and an intimate acquaintance with a mysterious and Protean Bogey called “the Game”—in short everything but reason[48]—(all these fine words, when boiled and peeled, turn out sometimes to mean ordinary observation, but more usually gross ignorance). So much for its theory; its practice is this—