THINKING.
——
“With some unmeaning thing, that they call thought.”—Pope.
“Think, and die.”—Shakespeare.

Never think!

Unless you have some remarkably good reason for taking your own course, do as you are told. If your partner leads a small trump, and you win the trick, return it at once:
“Gratia ab officio, quod mora tardat, abest.”

This is a much more simple and satisfactory plan than to proceed to think that he may have no more, or that the fourth player must hold major tenace over him; no one will admit more readily than I do that you are much the better player of the two, still, allow him to have some idea of the state of his own hand.

Don’t think whenever you see a card played that it is necessarily false.—“Nil sapienti? odiosius acumine nimio.”—Seneca.

[94]

As, on the whole, true cards are in the majority, you are more likely to be wrong than right, and the betting must be against you in the long run.
“My business and your own is not to inquire
Into such matters, but to mind our cue—
Which is to act as we are bid to do.”—Byron.

If you are blest with a sufficiently sharp eye to the left, you may occasionally know that a card is false, but knowledge acquired in that way I should not describe as thinking; I should use a quite different expression.

With the military gentleman who anathematized intellect I deeply sympathize. Profound thought about facts which have just taken place under your own eye is the bane of whist.

Why imitate Mark Twain’s fiery steed? Why, when it is your business to go on, “lean your head against something, and think?”

Whether you have seen a thing or not seen it, there can be no necessity for thought; recondite questions—such as whether the seven is the best of a suit of which all the others but the six are out, or whether a card is the twelfth or thirteenth—can be answered by a rational being in one of two ways, and two only; either he knows, or he does not know, there is no tertium quid; the curious practice of gazing intently at the chandelier and looking as intelligent as nature will permit—if not more so—though it is less confusing than going to the last trick for[95] information, and imposes upon some people, is no answer at all;[55] this, in whist circles, is called, or miscalled, thinking. It is not a new invention, for it has been known and practised from the earliest times. “There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes; and their eyelids are lifted up.”—Proverbs, chap. 30, verse 13, B.C. 1,000. Pecksniff, who had an extensive acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, knew it; you and all other schoolboys are adepts at it.

In Greek the very name of man—ανθρωπο?—was derived from this peculiar method of feigning intelligence, and it was by no means unknown to the Romans.
“Pronaque cum spectent animalia c?tera terram,
Os homini sublime dedit c?lumque tueri.”

But, however ancient and venerable the practice may be, it is one of those numerous practices more honoured in the breach than in the observance; surely, looking on the table is more in accordance with the dictates of common sense than attempting to eliminate unknown quantities from a chandelier. In the one you have gas and probably wa............