reading, and she said it wasn’t her book, it was Featherstone’s. She couldn’t understand more than a few words of it. She tossed the book to me, and the first lines that struck my eye had to do with white bile and black bile and other such internal fluids, and when I flipped to the title page it read
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
I put the book down and went back to the card table.
A man in a turban, a black tailcoat, and fringed buckskin leggings stood from his stool and said, Here, boy. They might as well take your money as mine for a while.
I sat down at the table, and a player with his back to the western window—so that he had no more definition than a silhouette cut from black paper—said in a flat voice, You not planning to gamble on credit, are you?
All I could see of him in particular was that he lacked a hand on his left side. Just a blunt stub sticking out from his coatsleeve. I was thinking, I am in a land of partial folk.
But what I said was, No sir. I’ve got cash money. What game are we playing?
—We’re switching to Blind-and-Straddle.
It was a game I knew and liked and had amassed great numbers of peppermint sticks playing. Featherstone, having the eldest hand, threw down a blind bet before the deal. He pitched out a little coin of some currency and denomination I did not know. It had a many-pointed figure like a child’s idea of the sun on the tail face of it. Then the dealer shuffled and started tossing, and I found myself sitting at the round table with a pretty good hand of tallowy-feeling playing cards spread in my fist.
The doubling straddle bets that followed involved a great deal of talk and complicated agreements on currency exchange, since they were made in the form of several varieties of gold and silver coins from various states and nations. There were doubloons, guineas, livres, pistareens, florins, ducats, Dutch dog dollars, Scotch marks, Portuguese half joes, Peruvian crossdollars, and even one old smooth-worn bezant. The coinage of all those wide-flung nations converged at this frontier gaming house by some unimaginable but mighty power of commerce, traveling on long and crooked trails. Many of the gold coins had pie pieces sheared from them, and this led to disagreements over the fractional values of the missing slices. Also, bets were made with such slices, and then the argument became whether the fractions were nearer to eight or to four. Featherstone was the ultimate arbiter of exchange, and no one argued with his conversions, no matter how outrageously favorable to him they seemed.
When it came my turn to bet, I had little idea what a suitable amount might be. I reached in my moneypurse and separated the Georgia scrip from the paper with the chicken recipe on it. I laid down two of the paper dollars, and someone laughed and another two or three grunted disfavorable judgment. The silhouetted man said everybody knew how Georgia money had set the current standard of worthlessness and that I would have gotten about as far in the game if I
had
tried to play on credit. I picked the paper up and jingled my aunt’s five silver pieces in my moneypurse and everybody settled down. I bet one of the coins and one man objected, but Featherstone picked it up and looked at it and pitched it back down into the pot and it rang against its brethren.
His verdict was that it would do, and the game went on.
When the hand neared a conclusion, four of my five hard dollars lay on the table, and I reckoned I was about to be done with gaming for the day. But when we showed our cards, I took the pot and they all laughed.
The lessons of the Manx schoolmaster stood me well in playing cards, and I kept on winning through the afternoon, and soon they all quit laughing. Featherstone and the one-armed man were the most regular defeatees. Piles of coins in confusing denominations rose in front of me, and I began worrying that the other players would decide to kill me and take my winnings and throw my
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
I put the book down and went back to the card table.
A man in a turban, a black tailcoat, and fringed buckskin leggings stood from his stool and said, Here, boy. They might as well take your money as mine for a while.
I sat down at the table, and a player with his back to the western window—so that he had no more definition than a silhouette cut from black paper—said in a flat voice, You not planning to gamble on credit, are you?
All I could see of him in particular was that he lacked a hand on his left side. Just a blunt stub sticking out from his coatsleeve. I was thinking, I am in a land of partial folk.
But what I said was, No sir. I’ve got cash money. What game are we playing?
—We’re switching to Blind-and-Straddle.
It was a game I knew and liked and had amassed great numbers of peppermint sticks playing. Featherstone, having the eldest hand, threw down a blind bet before the deal. He pitched out a little coin of some currency and denomination I did not know. It had a many-pointed figure like a child’s idea of the sun on the tail face of it. Then the dealer shuffled and started tossing, and I found myself sitting at the round table with a pretty good hand of tallowy-feeling playing cards spread in my fist.
The doubling straddle bets that followed involved a great deal of talk and complicated agreements on currency exchange, since they were made in the form of several varieties of gold and silver coins from various states and nations. There were doubloons, guineas, livres, pistareens, florins, ducats, Dutch dog dollars, Scotch marks, Portuguese half joes, Peruvian crossdollars, and even one old smooth-worn bezant. The coinage of all those wide-flung nations converged at this frontier gaming house by some unimaginable but mighty power of commerce, traveling on long and crooked trails. Many of the gold coins had pie pieces sheared from them, and this led to disagreements over the fractional values of the missing slices. Also, bets were made with such slices, and then the argument became whether the fractions were nearer to eight or to four. Featherstone was the ultimate arbiter of exchange, and no one argued with his conversions, no matter how outrageously favorable to him they seemed.
When it came my turn to bet, I had little idea what a suitable amount might be. I reached in my moneypurse and separated the Georgia scrip from the paper with the chicken recipe on it. I laid down two of the paper dollars, and someone laughed and another two or three grunted disfavorable judgment. The silhouetted man said everybody knew how Georgia money had set the current standard of worthlessness and that I would have gotten about as far in the game if I
had
tried to play on credit. I picked the paper up and jingled my aunt’s five silver pieces in my moneypurse and everybody settled down. I bet one of the coins and one man objected, but Featherstone picked it up and looked at it and pitched it back down into the pot and it rang against its brethren.
His verdict was that it would do, and the game went on.
When the hand neared a conclusion, four of my five hard dollars lay on the table, and I reckoned I was about to be done with gaming for the day. But when we showed our cards, I took the pot and they all laughed.
The lessons of the Manx schoolmaster stood me well in playing cards, and I kept on winning through the afternoon, and soon they all quit laughing. Featherstone and the one-armed man were the most regular defeatees. Piles of coins in confusing denominations rose in front of me, and I began worrying that the other players would decide to kill me and take my winnings and throw my
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