Decision B.—If a game is forgotten, it is no part of the losers’ duty to remind the winners of the fact.
Law 5.—This law is clear enough; still the first time you revoke and are found out, if your opponents hold honours and you have nothing scored—however many you have made by cards—they will claim a treble: you should be prepared for this. The claim is wrong, but in spite of that—possibly because of it—“they all do it.”
Law 7.—Decision.—You must call your honours audibly, but you are not obliged to yell because your adversaries are quarrelling.
Law 14.—Always get hold of the cards before cutting, and place a high card at one end of the pack and a low one at the other, then cut last and take either card you prefer: by this means you select your partner, this is an admirable coup and tends to the greatest happiness of the greatest number ([Note A], [page 2]) but it must be executed with judgment, for if you are detected your happiness will not be increased, rather the reverse. Some purists, anxious to be on the safe side, only keep an eye on the bottom card, and take it when it suits them.
Law 34.—Until the last few years, after you had cut the cards into two distinct packets, if the dealer thought fit to knock one of them over, leave a card on the table, or drop half-a-dozen or so about, it was a mis-deal on the ground that these proceedings were opposed to one or other of the next two laws, 35 and 36, but the latest decision is that the dealer can maltreat the pack in any way he likes and as often as he likes, and compel you to keep on cutting de die in diem.
Old Decision.—“You cannot make your adversary cut a second time; when you left a card on the table it could not be said that there was a confusion in the cutting, it is a mis-deal.”
New Decision.—“There is nothing in the laws to make this a mis-deal. The play comes under the term ‘Confusion of the cards,’ and there must be a fresh deal.”
If you see a potent, grave, and reverend seignior carefully lubricating his thumb with saliva, don’t imagine he is preparing it for deglutition, he is only about to deal. Even if he should swallow it, why interfere? he will not hurt you; it is not your thumb. Should you suffer from acute hyperæsthesis you can follow the example of an old friend of mine, who once rose from the table in his terror, and returned armed with a large pair of black kid gloves which he wore during the remainder of the seance: though the effect was funereal—not to say ghastly—it was attended with the best results in this case, but it is just as likely to lead to ill-feeling, and therefore to be deprecated. Leave the matter to time! Apart from the cards being glazed with lead, a single pack has been found to contain a fifth of an ounce of arsenic, and there is no known antidote. Even if not immediately fatal, the practice must be very deleterious. A whist enthusiast with a greater turn for mathematics than I can lay claim to, has counted from six to seven thousand bacteria on each square centimetre of a playing card, and makes this ghastly deduction: “it is really dreadful to reflect upon the colony of microbes which a person who moistens his thumb before dealing may convey into his mouth, and thence into his system.”—Standard, Nov. 2nd, 1893. “Everything comes to the man who can wait,” and while you are waiting always sit on the dealer’s right.