Cribbage

“ The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic; and to her approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence:—this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death.
The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious care; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage. ”

“ He was living at this time with his father, mother, and sister, in lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn. After being engaged in his taskwork at the India House, he returned in the evening to amuse his father by playing cribbage. The old man had sunk into dotage and the miserable selfishness that so often attends on old age. If his son wished to discontinue for a time the game at cribbage, and turn to some other avocation, or the writing of a letter, he would pettishly exclaim,—"If you don't play cribbage, I don't see the use of your coming home at all." ”

“ Throughout the repast Cousin Egbert was constantly attentive to my needs and was more cheerful of demeanour than I had ever seen him. The hunted look about his eyes, which had heretofore always distinguished him, was now gone, and he bore himself like a free man.
"Yes, sir," he said, as we smoked over the remains of the meal, "you stay with me and I'll give you one swell little time. I'll do the cooking, and between whiles we can sit right here and play cribbage day in and day out. You can get a taste of real life without moving." ”

“ Another way of stopping a horse from cribbing is to blindfold the animal, place a block of wood on the incisor teeth and strike it with a mallet. By this cruel means the parts are made so sore that the horse temporarily stops catching hold of the manger to crib and suck wind.
The buyer should always, when possible, see the horse in the stall prior to the show out. If he remembers this and moves quick enough he may see the horse wearing a strap buckled around his neck just back of the ears. Such a horse is a cribber and wind-sucker and the strap is put on to prevent the latter vice. ”

“ The word has many transferred meanings, as a rough, small hut or dwelling, from which comes the slang use of “crib” as a berth or situation, or, as a burglar’s term for a house to be broken into; also, technically, in engineering for a timber framework for masonry constructed with a caisson in laying foundations below water, or in mining for a timber lining to a shaft. “Crib-biting” is a vicious habit in horses, probably due in the first instance to indigestion; the horse seizes the manger or other object in its teeth, and draws in the breath, known as “wind-sucking” ”

“ A dreamy sense, coming of weakness and the desire to sleep, crept over me. The scampering rats no longer set my brain burning. I was content to rest and wait for death. And in this new mood of my exhaustion I heard the trap above me open of a sudden, and the pit was lighted with a very blaze of light. I looked up and saw the cripple poised there upon his crutches, a flaming torch in his hand. For a minute he stood like some human vulture; his eyes outstanding, his face still bloody. Then he closed the trap with a snap, and I was alone with the darkness. ”

“ The navigator resorted to purring, and endeavoured to effect a conquest by hugging; but Cribb clareted him in all directions, and marked his body so severely, that he now could scarcely articulate the provincial, “I yeald!” The only regret expressed by the Champion was that, during an attack of twenty minutes, he could not put in a straight blow, as the navigator never stood up like a man, merely attempting by foul means to throw or disable his man. Cribb returned home without a scratch, while the man of mud received an important lesson on the advantages of science. ”

“ The female bird listened, too, for about a minute, and then, ignoring the poor cripple as if he had never existed, hopped towards the spruce-fir—atop of which a particularly fine and strong-voiced songster was warbling—as if she were drawn by ropes. And—oh, horror!—the songster came down to her.
The cripple never uttered a sound, not a song, or a call, or a sign. He hurled himself straight at this new rival like a bolt shot from a crossbow, and he fought. My word, how he fought! But this new antagonist was no half-frozen, half-starved Continental song thrush. ”

“ The girl was placed upon the mule, and old Ferrier upon one of the horses, with his money-bag, while Jefferson Hope led the other along the precipitous and dangerous path.
It was a bewildering route for anyone who was not accustomed to face Nature in her wildest moods. On the one side a great crag towered up a thousand feet or more, black, stern, and menacing, with long basaltic columns upon its rugged surface like the ribs of some petrified monster. On the other hand a wild chaos of boulders and debris made all advance impossible. ”

“ He quaked and turned pale with dread as with the great rope knotted about his arm-pits and around his waist he was swung over the brink at the point where the crag jutted forth,—lower and lower still; now nearing the slanting inverted pine, caught amidst the débris of earth and rock; now failing to reach its boughs; once more swinging back to a great distance, so did the length of the rope increase the scope of the pendulum ”

“ Without a second glance at him, the club man wheeled and came running to where the woman and the third attacker lay fighting and struggling on the ground. This man had got the blow of the stone in, catching the woman on the side, but without entirely disabling her. The great crab and the bundle of sea refuse was the prize that had drawn the plunderers, and they were the objects for which now the woman was risking her life—she who could have obtained safety at the outset by dropping her load. ”

“ So on warm nights, during the last half of the summer, there was sure to be a Crickets’ concert.
Sometimes it seemed to Johnnie Green, who lived in the farmhouse, as if Chirpy Cricket and his relations were trying to drown the songs of the musical Frog family, over in the swamp. ”

“ One fact had repeatedly struck me as significant, and that was the circumstance that every morning between six and half-past, as already narrated, the same cripple went down the street; and in connexion with this, within the last few days of the time, a curious coincidence had revealed itself to me. From the tapping of his crutches on the stones I discovered that while one was shod with iron, the other was not. Now where and when had I noticed that peculiarity in a cripple before? ”

“ Yes, that is a crow, cawing; but far, far off. Distance softens sound as it softens the landscape, and as time, which is only another kind of distance, softens grief. A cricket at my elbow plays his tune, irregularly and slowly. The low temperature slackens his tempo. Now he is done. There is only the stirring of leaves. Some of the birch leaves, I see, are already turning yellow, and once in a while, as the wind whispers to one of them, it lets go its hold and drops. ”

“ Until his formal retirement, Cribb never allowed his title of Champion to 268be questioned; and at the conclusion of the set-to between Harmer and Lancaster, at the Fives Court, on August 7th, 1820, the Champion rushed in, almost out of wind, made his way through the audience in a twinkling, ascended the stage with great rapidity, and threw up his hat. With his other hand he snatched out his pocket-book, and, with great animation and good emphasis, spoke to the following effect—keeping in mind our immortal bard’s advice to the actors, to
“Suit the action to the word.” ”

“ But it sometimes happens that the sportsman, at a moment when there is no time to run a drag,—for instance, after dinner when smoking a cigar, he suddenly takes it into his head to kill a wolf, and it is too late to bait the spot; nevertheless the hunter will have nothing less than his wolf. Before leaving home, therefore, he orders his servant to bring him a duck; this he puts into his pocket, and shouldering his gun, seeks the depths of the forest alone. ”

“ When you go crabbing you can have almost as many lines out as you can watch—it is not like catching fish with a hook. Crabs do not take the bait in their mouth. They catch hold of it in their front claws, and start to go away with it to some quiet hole, or under some rock, where they may eat as they please. ”

“ Mr Crab held tight hold of him, and seemed resolved to eat him up. Poor Snakie tried to get his tail round a bit of rock, to keep himself out of the water; but Crabie pulled and hauled, and, in spite of all resistance, got him down to the very edge of the water, knowing that when once under it his struggles would very soon cease. Crabs have, however, to learn the lesson that there is many a slip between the catch and the feast. A frigate bird had from afar espied the combat, and, flying like a flash of lightning, downward he darted and seized the snake by the back. ”

“ Cribb attended by Gully and Bill Gibbons, and Gregson with his seconds, Jem Belcher and Richmond. Odds five to four in favour of Cribb, more betters than takers. At a quarter before one they set-to.
THE FIGHT. [133] Round 1.—The instant Cribb shook hands he stept back, and assumed his attitude. Short sparring, each anxious for the first hit. Gregson attempted to lead with his left hand, but his distance was ill-judged, and fell short. Cribb was also ineffectual, as his blow went over his opponent’s shoulder. They closed, and both fell, Gregson uppermost. ”

“ Now and then, too, the long-drawn crowing of a cock, accidentally awakened, would sound far, far off, from some farm house away among the hills—but it was like a dreaming sound in his ear. No signs of life occurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bull frog, from a neighbouring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably, and turning suddenly in his bed. ”

“ Then the inexplicable charms of danger excite the sportsman's feelings; his physical faculties, like those [Pg 169] of the Indian, are doubled; he grasps his rifle with a firmer clutch, and looks down the blade of his hunting-knife with anxiety and yet with satisfaction. It grows dark, but his eyes pierce the gloom—his life is at stake, but he forgets that it is so; for the love of the chase, the wild pleasures of the huntsman, have taken possession of his soul. ”

“ Without in the least heeding the brambles and bushes which caught his legs, or the ditches and streams he was obliged to cross, he pressed on; and after a continued and sanguinary battle with the thorns, the stumps, the roots, and the long wild roses, came exactly on the path where the trap was set. The night was now nearly dark, and, in his agitation and hurry, thinking only of his doves and the loved one, he failed to observe that several little pieces of string were swinging to and fro in the breeze from the branches of a thicket near him. ”

“ These men are mounted either on horseback, or on an ass, or they put on a pair of sabots and walk, each of them dragging after him, through the wood and along the unfrequented paths, his portion of the bait, stopping every now and then to let the soil over which it passes be as much as possible impregnated with the smell of the flesh on the verge of corruption. ”

“ One big chipanzee went simply wild for a time—so much so that an attendant came along to see what the trouble was. It capered furiously, thundered at the bars of its cage, and then executed a hideous kind of cluttering dance, beating its hands and feet on the floor with extraordinary rapidity. ”

“ At last, what with his own efforts and the people plucking at his opponent’s hands, Cribb got free and retreated towards the nearest corner. A less courageous man would have contrived to slip down. As it was, Molineux caught him, and, avoiding a hard left with which Cribb lunged at his body, seized the champion’s head under his arm and proceeded to punish him with short, jolting blows, from which presently Cribb fell exhausted to the ground. He brought Cribb down again the next round as well. ”

“ The bird gradually descended until it perched on a tree close to the Prince and said: ‘The wizard of Finland greets thee and bids me say that thou mayst free the maiden thus: Go to the river and smear thyself all over with mud; then say: “From a man into a crab,” and thou wilt become a crab. Plunge boldly into the water, swim as close as thou canst to the water-lily’s roots, and loosen them from the mud and reeds. ”

“ I looked at Crip in silence. Was there no end to perils?
“Let us hope they’ll travel on,” he added. “There’s plenty of food abroad for them. But tell me, where did you find that worm?”
“Back in the far corner. Come with me. I was cleaning out the débris when I came upon him.” ”

“ From now onwards we were working among crevasses fairly constantly. I loathe them in full daylight when much can be done to avoid them, and when if you fall into them you can at any rate see where the sides are, which way they run and how best to scramble out; when your companions can see how to stop the sledge to which you are all attached by your harness; how most safely to hold the sledge when stopped; how, if you are dangling fifteen feet down in a chasm, to work above you to get you up to the surface again. ”