England.

It appears that at Graham's Club, at the commencement of the season,
and before Lord de Ros came to town, whispers were circulated of unfair
play, and various persons were supposed guilty. A determination was
therefore formed that the club should be dissolved and reconstructed,
leaving out the names of certain persons to whom suspicion attached. The
main object of the master of the club, and of some of those who attended
it for the purpose of professional gain, was that its character should
be cleared. Not long after Lord de Ros came to town he received an
anonymous letter, cautioning him against continuing to play at Graham's,
and intimating to him, if he did so, that measures would be taken which
he would have reason to regret. Of course his Lordship disregarded the
threat; he attended the club for several days more assiduously than
before, and continued to play until the end of the season, in the
beginning of July. In September the Satirist newspaper published a
distinct charge of unfair play against Lord de Ros, whilst the latter
was at Baden, and he returned to England and commenced an action for
libel against the newspaper.

He was charged with being in the habit of marking the cards, the effect
being to create a very slight and almost imperceptible indentation, and
to make a ridge or wave on the back, so that a practised eye would be
able, on looking at the right place, knowing where to expect a mark,
to discern whether the ace was there or not. He was also charged with
cheating by reversing the cut--that is, when the cards had come to him,
after having been cut by his adversary, instead of putting the bottom
card at the top, keeping the bottom card at the bottom, by some
shuffling contrivance when he dealt. Another witness said:--

'When he took up the two parcels of cards, after the operation of
cutting the pack by his right-hand adversary, he was always attacked
with a hacking cough, or what I may properly denominate, especially from
the result it produced, a 'king cough,' because a king or an ace was
invariably its effect. The cough always came on at the most convenient
moment to distract the attention of the other players, and was evidently
indulged in for the purpose of abstracting their attention from the
table and from the manoeuvre he was about to perform. However, I never
saw him "slip the card," and I never had cognizance of its execution,
but certain it was that the ace or the king, which