Two University men, who are up in town
for a week's lark, but are supposed (I hear)
by sanguine friends to be at college, reading
at that present; their talk is of the boats,
the proctors, the tripos, and of the man who
went to the bad.

Sometimes—for I was not born into the
world a billiard-marker—these topics touch
me nearly. What does it matter? I am
here; and, whether through my own bad
play, or an unlucky fluke, it is now all one;
my mission is to mark, not moralise.

After four, drop in the pool-players: five
or six habitués and a few strangers. Some of
them gentlemen, but the majority, evident
legs—quiet resolute-looking fellows,
with hard keen eyes; abstemious moral
persons, with iron nerves, and perfectly
heartless, who live by this particular pastime.
They would win the last half-crown of the
player before them, although they knew the
loss would insure his immediate suicide.
They would remark, after he had drowned
himself, that he had only taken to the water.
From the prosecution of this game for eight
hours daily, their view of life has been
formed: it is one gigantic pool to them
wherein every man's hand is against the
other's, and the misfortune of one makes
all the rest happy. Each has a little sort of
coffin, locked, which holds his particular cue.
He looks along this weapon carefully, to
make certain of its straightness, rubs the
thin end with scouring-paper, and chalks the
top with his own private chalk, of which he
carries a piece about with him, in his waistcoat-
pocket, everywhere. From the time when
I have given out the balls to the last stroke
which wins, or divides the pool, these men
maintain an almost unbroken silence. No
judge in delivery of a death doom, no priest
in the celebration of religious rites, could
be graver or more solemn than they. "My,
blue on yellow, brown your player," or
"Red on white, yellow in hand," break forth
amidst the hush, like minute-guns during a
burial at sea; the click of the balls, the whiz
when one is forced into a pocket, are the only
other sounds. Many of our visitors in the
mid-day ask for lunch, which is invariably
toasted cheese; but, these night-birds, with
the exception of a little beer and tobacco-
smoke, suffer nothing to pass their lips.
Sometimes, amidst those solemn scoundrels
there appears a jovial face— a naval man
on leave, perhaps, or somebody who is really
a little screwed, and creates a disturbance:
laughing and singing, putting the best off
their play, and endangering the wariest by
his mad strokes. Mr. Crimp looks on those
occasions, as though, being hungry, some one
had come between him and his dinner; and I
observe his lips to move silently—I do not
think in prayer. There is a pretty constant
attendant here, a Mr. Scurvy, who is, I
know, his especial aversion. This gentleman
comes for no earthly purpose but to amuse
himself, and with his spirits always at high
pressure. He makes puns, and uses ready-
made puns, about everything connected with
the game. He is come, he states, on entrance,
"To plunge in the quiet pool." "Consider
yourself, Captain," said he, yesterday, while
he held that instrument over Mr. Crimp,
"under a rest." "No rest for the guilty," is
his quotation whenever that is called for.
He calls the cues that have lost their top-
leathers, "ex-cues." You can imagine what
a range such a man finds in "stars" and
"lives;" how the church and the army are
each laid under contribution for his remarks
on "cannons;" how "misses" and "kisses"
are remarked upon. If the red ball is kissed,
he remarks, on each occasion, "No wonder
she blushes." And all this waggishness of
his is the more creditable, insomuch as he
might just as well whisper it into one of the
pockets, as impart it to his company with any
hope whatever of appreciation. He does not
want that; it is merely that he has an
exuberance of merriment, and must let it off
somehow: which is to the others generally
an awful crime, and beyond their experience.
Mr. Scurvy gives me a shilling now and then,
as do many of the earlier visitors. I have
my rewards from Mr. Crimp; and I am not,
besides, ill paid. It is not of the hardships
of my profession that I have to complain,
(though I am up always until three in the
morning, with the thermometer for the last
six hours at about eighty), so much as of
its unsocial character; nobody trusts me;
nobody interests himself in me in the least,
or considers me as anything beyond a
peripatetic convenience for getting at your ball
when it is out of reach. Nobody ever gets
familiar with me, except Mr. Crimp, and
I am the dumb witness, daily, of innumerable
frauds.

I know the real skill of every player to a
hair, and how much he conceals of it. I think
I may say, from long habit of observation, that
I know the characters of nine-tenths of the
men who enter this room; and if I do, some
of them are exceedingly bad characters. The
calm dead hand at a hazard, whom nothing
disturbs from his aim; the man who plays
for a stroke only when it is a certainty,
preferring his own safety to his foe's danger; the
hard hitter, from whom no player is secure;
the man who is always calling his own
strokes flukes; the man who is always calling
other people's; and the poor fellow who is for
ever under the cushion. My world, which is
not a small one, is mapped out for me, with
all its different races, upon this table; for I
stand apart and mark many things beside
the score.