make it their only occupation. They play away mantle and all to the bare skin, and then truss themselves in straw or leaves; they wait for passengers in the highway, invite them to game upon the green, and ask no more but companions to make them sport. For default of other stuff they pawn their glibs, the nails of their fingers and toes, their dimissaries, which they leese or redeem at the courtesy of the winner."
Some fifteen or twenty years ago an instance of this playing at mayhem occurred in England. Two Smithfield drovers tost up for each others ears. They were in savage earnest, and the winner cropt his antagonist with a common knife, close to the head. This however seems to have proceeded from a bravado of brutality on both sides, not from a spirit of gambling, of which there is less among the common people in England than in any other country. Those who have any propensity to this
