er thought may
console you; the sporting public-house, once popular, now attracts but a
few, and that few a weak and vicious class. Is not this matter of
encouragement?

THE PUBLIC-HOUSE WITH A BILLIARD-ROOM

Is a great attraction in some places. We knew a whole town upset by the
fact that the landlord of the "Swan" had fitted up a billiard-room. I
and Wiggins and Foley and Jobson spent at one time, I regret to say, a
good deal of time there. I am warning the reader against the follies of
my youth; but Foley failed, and Jobson and Wiggins, after having had
their debts paid three or four times by their friends, I believe are now
following that eminently healthy occupation called gold-digging,
somewhere in Australia. Then I think of that little town in South Wales,
and of the "Angel," under whose too hospitable roof we used to meet. One
of us was an M.P's son; he is now, I believe, dragging down a father's
grey hairs with sorrow to the grave. Another of us bore a name dear to
every Englishman; he, I believe, is pensioned off by his family, and
lives as he can on the handsome allowance of a guinea a-week. But these
London billiard-rooms are fifty times more pernicious. There are some
five or six hundred connected with public-houses. There are in all our
large thoroughfares separate rooms licensed for this game, but at these
drinking often goes on. And thus the two excitements acting on the man,
he is impelled downwards with an increasing power. I have seen in these
rooms officers and secretaries of public companies in a night losing, I
am sure, a quarter's salary; I have seen young fellows completely ruined.
There was not, when I first knew him, a more promising, gentlemanly young
fellow than Smethwicke, and now, they tell me, he is in Marylebone
Workhouse.

We are told that men are grown-up children. This saying forcibly
occurred to me the last time I was in a billiard-room. After I had
recovered from the feeling of suffocation which an atmosphere infected by
gas and smoke had produced, I observed a number of men with long sticks
trying to knock a number of various-coloured balls into any of the six
pockets of the billiard-table. At each unsuccessful attempt a chorus of
observations were made by the players, not remarkable for their novelty,
for the vocabulary of the billiard-room is very limited, such as "Not
within a mile"--"I didn't play for you, Bob"--"It smelt the hole," &c.
&c. At each suc