Believing Any Of those 10 Myths About What Is Billiards Retains You From Growing

Well, if I know myself at all, I could have borne anything but billiards. No; you were not at any of these places; but I know well enough where you were. But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone. I was very curious to know what had become of the doolies. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real. And you were not at your Club: no, I know that. It involves two players or two teams, each aiming to pocket their designated balls (stripes or solids) and then sink the 8-ball to win. Tennis, for instance, when you first fail to win a short chase, or your opponent keeps on serving nicks; billiards, when your ball is always under a cushion, or the balls dead safe time after time; cricket, when an umpire has given you out by a mistake of judgment-all these are trials, and they form part of the discipline of life. Rack. The frame used to help position the object balls before the start of the game. It resembled the game of Loo, and probably derived its name from the ancient sport described above. Handicap was also the name of an old game at cards, now obsolete.

But though golf may be more trying to the temper than any other game, every game has its trials. Something may be learned, we firmly believe, even from skittles and ping-pong. He recovered himself more quickly from this one, however, and inflated his chest with even more than his usual pomposity. Don't let a youth suppose that, because a golfer of great skill is a victim to one or more of these fads, it is necessary that he should be so also. One great value of games is that they are the finest discipline for the temper. To prove how much nerve is the first, second, and third necessity in putting, you may take a man of thirty years old who has been and perhaps still is a good cricketer, and has a good eye for games generally. I have mentioned golf and billiards together as the two games that give the hardest test of nerve, and the reason is this, that in both games strength is the all-important matter: strokes that require calculation of strength want nerve, but frequently are played without it.

In a long hole of over four hundred yards, the golfer need not bother his head about strength for the first two strokes; he has to hit both these as hard as he can-there is no nice calculation of less or more. To the huge majority of players there are one or more clubs in which they cannot affect to feel much confidence. If strength or the consideration of strength be the chief cause of nervousness, what is billiards billiards ought therefore to be more of a test of nerve than golf. It is possible to do it to a small extent only at golf. There is another reason why golf is a greater test of nerve than billiards, and that is the variety of weapons that you must have for different strokes. There was no chance for him to overhear any conversation, for he was always sent out of the way when the two were closeted together. But Mr. Hilton has to take out an iron club, because there are some occasions when it is absolutely impossible to use any other club. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed.

Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives in India acted itself in dâk-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. In the first place he inquired in a very loud voice of Captain Tuck, at the other end of the table, whether that gentleman had ever met the deceased Major-General Scully, and being answered in the negative, he descanted fluently upon the merits of that imaginary warrior. The major and his hostess played against Captain Livingstone Tuck and an old gentleman who came from Lambeth, with the result that the gallant captain and his partner rose up poorer and sadder men, which was rather a blow to the former, who reckoned upon clearing a little on such occasions, and had not expected to find himself opposed by such a past master of the art as the major. Then came the ratub-a curious meal, half native and half English in composition-with the old man babbling behind my chair about dead and gone masters and the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains. Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see-fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat-fear that makes you sweat in the palms of the hands, arid gulp in order to keep the uvula at work?