The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic; and to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence:—­this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death.

The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious care; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage.  It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say,—­disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to it.  She could never heartily bring her mouth to pronounce “go”—­or “that’s a go.”  She called it an ungrammatical game.  The pegging teased her.  I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five dollar stake), because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring “two for his heels.”  There is something extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial.  Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born.

Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms—­such as pique—­repique—­the capot—­they savoured (she thought) of affectation.  But games for two, or even three, she never greatly cared for.  She loved the quadrate, or square.  She would argue thus:—­Cards are warfare:  the ends are gain, with glory.  But cards are war, in disguise of a sport:  when single adversaries encounter, the ends proposed are too palpable.  By themselves, it is too close a fight; with spectators, it is not much bettered.  No looker on can be interested, except for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of money; he cares not for your luck sympathetically, or for your play.—­Three are still worse; a mere naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance; or a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, as in tradrille.—­But in square games (she meant whist) all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is accomplished.  There are the incentives of profit with honour, common to every species—­though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a participator.  But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too.  They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted.  He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence.  Whist abhors neutrality, or interest beyond its sphere.  You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold—­or even an interested—­by-stander witnesses it, but because your partner sympathises in the contingency.  You win for two.  You