ter of a century ago I arrived in London to lecture a few weeks
under the management of George Dolby, who had conducted the Dickens
readings in America five or six years before. He took me to the
Albemarle and fed me, and in the course of the dinner he enlarged a good
deal, and with great satisfaction, upon his reputation as a player of
fifteen-ball pool, and when he learned by my testimony that I had never
seen the game played, and knew nothing of the art of pocketing balls,
he enlarged more and more, and still more, and kept on enlarging, until
I recognized that I was either in the presence of the very father of
fifteen-ball pool or in the presence of his most immediate descendant.
At the end of the dinner Dolby was eager to introduce me to the game and
show me what he could do. We adjourned to the billiard-room and he
framed the balls in a flat pyramid and told me to fire at the apex ball
and then go on and do what I could toward pocketing the fifteen, after
which he would take the cue and show me what a past-master of the game
could do with those balls. I did as required. I began with the
diffidence proper to my ignorant estate, and when I had finished my
inning all the balls were in the pockets and Dolby was burying me under
a volcanic irruption of acid sarcasms.

So I was a liar in Dolby's belief. He thought he had been sold, and at a
cheap rate; but he divided his sarcasms quite fairly and quite equally
between the two of us. He was full of ironical admiration of his
childishness and innocence in letting a wandering and characterless and
scandalous American load him up with deceptions of so transparent a
character that they ought not to have deceived the house cat. On the
other hand, he was remorselessly severe upon me for beguiling him, by
studied and discreditable artifice, into bragging and boasting about his
poor game in the presence of a professional expert disguised in lies and
frauds, who could empty more balls in billiard pockets in an hour than
he could empty into a basket in a day.

In the matter of fifteen-ball pool I never got Dolby's confidence wholly
back, though I got it in other ways, and kept it until his death. I have
played that game a number of times since, but that first time was the
only time in my life that I have ever pocketed all the fifteen in a
single inning.

[Sidenote: (1876.)]

My unsuspicious nature has made it necessary for Providence to save me
from traps a number of times. Th