brothers,
  (You BUCKETTS, and WOODFORDS and COOPERS and others,
  Whose names he need hardly string into his rhymes,)
  Punch hopes you may look on this Record sometimes
  With pleasant reflections.  Mere words, he well knows,
  Will not—­“butter your parsnips”—­(to put sense in prose): 
  But you have his hearty good will, and you know it,—­
  Right gladly he takes this occasion to show it! 
  And when or wherever another should come,
  Be sure your friend Punch won’t be careless or dumb!

* * * * *

CONFESSIONS OF A DUFFER.

VI.—­THE DUFFER AT WHIST.

(CONTINUED.)

I am really fond of the game, which is fortunate, though my partners don’t think so; but I am free to confess, that nothing short of an absorbing admiration for it and desire to excel, could tempt me to brave the sarcasms, even insults, to which I am subjected.  Your thoroughgoing Whist-player as such—­admirable in private life as I personally know him to be—­the moment he begins the daily business of his life, seems to cast his better nature to the winds.  At another time and place he would lend a sympathetic ear to any tale of woe; now and here nothing seems to interest him but his own immediate welfare, which he pursues with concentrated energy and earnestness.  I verily believe that if, at one of two adjoining tables, the chandelier fell on the players’ heads to their exceeding detriment, the occupants of the other table would scarcely lift their eyes or interrupt their rubber for one moment. Fiant chartae ruat coelum—­let the cards be made whatever chandeliers fall.

[Illustration:  “When I come to think the matter over in cold blood.”]

The players at my Club are all good, one especially so, a retired Colonel of a West Indian regiment, of whom I stand in mortal dread.  He has short shrift for any failings, even of players nearly as good as himself, whilst as for me! though he has never yet resorted to personal violence with a chair-leg, yet that would not surprise me; and my pestilent fate in defiance of all mathematical odds in such case made and provided, is to cut him as my partner three and four times in succession in an evening.  I sometimes have glimmerings of sense, and in hands presenting no particular difficulty, if they contain plenty of good cards—­can manage to scrape along in a way I think fairly satisfactory even—­to him, though he never encourages me by saying so.  But an awful thing happened the other night.  I had played one rubber with him and won it, though it was only a rubber of two instead of a bumper, as it would have been if I had played properly—­for being in doubt and remembering the adage, I had led a trump, but it subsequently turned out that the adversaries had called for them.  Now I never see an adversaries’ call, and but rarely those of my partner, unless when made glaringly conspicuous by a ten and a two, so I led this wretched card with disastrous results.