I tried making counts with
four balls, but found it difficult and discouraging, so I added a fifth
ball, then a sixth, then a seventh, and kept on adding until at last I
had twelve balls on the table and a thirteenth to play with. My game was
caroms--caroms solely--caroms plain, or caroms with cushion to
help--anything that could furnish a count. In the course of time I found
to my astonishment that I was never able to run fifteen, under any
circumstances. By huddling the balls advantageously in the beginning, I
could now and then coax fourteen out of them, but I couldn't reach
fifteen by either luck or skill. Sometimes the balls would get scattered
into difficult positions and defeat me in that way; sometimes if I
managed to keep them together, I would freeze; and always when I froze,
and had to play away from the contact, there was sure to be nothing to
play at but a wide and uninhabited vacancy.

One day Mr. Dalton called on my brother-in-law, on a matter of business,
and I was asked if I could entertain him awhile, until my brother-in-law
should finish an engagement with another gentleman. I said I could, and
took him up to the billiard-table. I had played with him many times at
the club, and knew that he could play billiards tolerably well--only
tolerably well--but not any better than I could. He and I were just a
match. He didn't know our table; he didn't know those balls; he didn't
know those warped and headless cues; he didn't know the southeastern
slant of the table, and how to allow for it. I judged it would be safe
and profitable to offer him a bet on my scheme. I emptied the avalanche
of thirteen balls on the table and said:

"Take a ball and begin, Mr. Dalton. How many can you run with an outlay
like that?"

He said, with the half-affronted air of a mathematician who has been
asked how much of the multiplication table he can recite without a
break:

"I suppose a million--eight hundred thousand, anyway."

I said "You shall hove the privilege of placing the balls to suit
yourself, and I want to bet you a dollar that you can't run fifteen."

I will not dwell upon the sequel. At the end of an hour his face was
red, and wet with perspiration; his outer garments lay scattered here
and there over the place; he was the angriest man in the State, and
there wasn't a rag or remnant of an injurious adjective left in him
anywhere--and I had all his small change.

When the summer was over, we went home to Hartfo