ho dole dem carts?' 'Jakey Einstein' was the
answer. 'Jakey Einstein?' he repeated, laying down his hand; 'den I pass
out.'

The history of the game will be found very interesting by all
card-lovers. Like most of the distinctly national products of America,
it seems to have been imported from abroad and can be traced back to an
Italian game in the fifteenth century. Euchre was probably acclimatised
on the Mississippi by the Canadian voyageurs, being a form of the French
game of Triomphe. It was a Kentucky citizen who, desiring to give his
sons a few words of solemn advice for their future guidance in life, had
them summoned to his deathbed and said to them, 'Boys, when you go down
the river to Orleens jest you beware of a game called Yucker where the
jack takes the ace;--it's unchristian!'--after which warning he lay back
and died in peace. And 'it was Euchre which the two gentlemen were
playing in a boat on the Missouri River when a bystander, shocked by the
frequency with which one of the players turned up the jack, took the
liberty of warning the other player that the winner was dealing from the
bottom, to which the loser, secure in his power of self-protection,
answered gruffly, "Well, suppose he is--it's his deal, isn't it?"'

The chapter On the Antiquity of Jests, with its suggestion of an
International Exhibition of Jokes, is capital. Such an exhibition, Mr.
Matthews remarks, would at least dispel any lingering belief in the old
saying that there are only thirty-eight good stories in existence and
that thirty-seven of these cannot be told before ladies; and the
Retrospective Section would certainly be the constant resort of any true
folklorist. For most of the good stories of our time are really
folklore, myth survivals, echoes of the past. The two well-known
American proverbs, 'We have had a hell of a time' and 'Let the other man
walk' are both traced back by Mr. Matthews: the first to Walpole's
letters, and the other to a story Poggio tells of an inhabitant of
Perugia who walked in melancholy because he could not pay his debts.
'Vah, stulte,' was the advice given to him, 'leave anxiety to your
creditors!' and even Mr. William M. Evart's brilliant repartee when he
was told that Washington once threw a dollar across the Natural Bridge in
Virginia, 'In those days a dollar went so much farther than it does now!'
seems to be the direct descendant of a witty remark of Foote's, though we
must say that in thi