with skill ; this makes it a chancy game, and the element of luck comes largely in.
We had a couple of grand tournaments, to determine who should be "Champion of the Pacific"; they included among the participants nearly all the passengers, of both sexes, and the officers of the ship, and they afforded many days of stu- pendous interest and excitement, and murderous exercise — for horse- billiards is a physically violent game.
The figures iti the following record of some of the closing
games in the first tournament will show, better than any
description, how very chancy the game is. The losers here
represented had all been winners in the previous games of the
series, some of them by fine majorities :
Chase, 102 Mrs. D., 57 Mortimer, 105 The Surgeon, 92
MissC, 105 Mrs. T., 9 Clemens, 101 Taylor, 92
Taylor, 109 Davies, 95 MissC, 108 Mortimer, 55
Thomas, 102 Roper, 76 Clemens, 111 Miss C, 89
Coomber, 106 Chase, 98
And so on ; until but three couples of winners were left. Then I beat my man, young Smith beat his man, and Thomas beat his. This reduced the combatants to three. Smith and I took the deck, and I led off. . At the close of the first inning I was 10 worse than nothing and Smith had scored 7. The luck continued against me. When I was 57, Smith was 97 — within 3 of out. The luck changed then. He picked up a 10-off or so, and couldn't recover. I beat him.
The next game would end tournament No. 1.
Mr. Thomas and I were the contestants. He won the lead and went to the bat — so to speak. And there he stood, with the crotch of his cue resting against his disk while the ship rose slowly up, sank slowly down, rose again, sank again. She never seemed to rise to suit him exactly. She started up once more; and when she was nearly ready for the turn, he let drive and landed his disk just within the left-hand end of the
