’If you to have your book criticized favorably, give yourself a good notice in the Preface!’ is the golden rule laid down for the guidance of authors by Mr. Brander Matthews in an amusing essay on the art of preface-writing and, true to his own theory, he announces his volume as ’the most interesting, the most entertaining, and the most instructive book of the decade.’  Entertaining it certainly is in parts.  The essay on Poker, for instance, is very brightly and pleasantly written.  Mr. Proctor objected to Poker on the somewhat trivial ground that it was a form of lying, and on the more serious ground that it afforded special opportunities for cheating; and, indeed, he regarded the mere existence of the game outside gambling dens as ’one of the most portentous phenomena of American civilisation.’  Mr. Brander Matthews points out, in answer to these grave charges, that Bluffing is merely a suppressio veri and that it requires a great deal of physical courage on the part of the player.  As for the cheating, he claims that Poker affords no more opportunities for the exercise of this art than either Whist or Ecarte, though he admits that the proper attitude towards an opponent whose good luck is unduly persistent is that of the German-American who, finding four aces in his hand, was naturally about to bet heavily, when a sudden thought struck him and he inquired, ‘Who 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?"’