e, games played with a fiendish outfit furnish ecstasies
of delight which games played with the other kind cannot match.
Twenty-seven years ago my budding little family spent the summer at
Bateman's Point, near Newport, Rhode Island. It was a comfortable
boarding-place, well stocked with sweet mothers and little children, but
the male sex was scarce; however, there was another young fellow besides
myself, and he and I had good times--Higgins was his name, but that was
not his fault. He was a very pleasant and companionable person. On the
premises there was what had once been a bowling-alley. It was a single
alley, and it was estimated that it had been out of repair for sixty
years--but not the balls, the balls were in good condition; there were
forty-one of them, and they ranged in size from a grapefruit up to a
lignum-vitae sphere that you could hardly lift. Higgins and I played on
that alley day after day. At first, one of us located himself at the
bottom end to set up the pins in case anything should happen to them,
but nothing happened. The surface of that alley consisted of a rolling
stretch of elevations and depressions, and neither of us could, by any
art known to us, persuade a ball to stay on the alley until it should
accomplish something. Little balls and big, the same thing always
happened--the ball left the alley before it was half-way home and went
thundering down alongside of it the rest of the way and made the
gamekeeper climb out and take care of himself. No matter, we persevered,
and were rewarded. We examined the alley, noted and located a lot of its
peculiarities, and little by little we learned how to deliver a ball in
such a way that it would travel home and knock down a pin or two. By and
by we succeeded in improving our game to a point where we were able to
get all of the pins with thirty-five balls--so we made it a
thirty-five-ball game. If the player did not succeed with thirty-five,
he had lost the game. I suppose that all the balls, taken together,
weighed five hundred pounds, or maybe a ton--or along there
somewhere--but anyway it was hot weather, and by the time that a player
had sent thirty-five of them home he was in a drench of perspiration,
and physically exhausted.

Next, we started cocked hat--that is to say, a triangle of three pins,
the other seven being discarded. In this game we used the three smallest
balls and kept on delivering them until we got the three pins down.
After a day