Axidava

Chinese Games And Gambling

Herbert Allen Giles

Chinamen suffer horribly from ennui—especially the first of the four classes into which the non-official world has been subdivided [Namely, (1) the literati, (2) agriculturists, (3) artisans, and (4) merchants or tradesmen]. They have no rational amusements wherewith to fill up the intervals of work. They hate physical exercise; more than that, they despise it as fit only for the ignorant and low. Yet they have not supplied its place with anything intellectual, and the most casual observer cannot fail to notice that China has no national game.

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The Gambler

William Russell

A little more than a year after the period when adverse circumstances—chiefly the result of my own reckless follies—compelled me to enter the ranks of the metropolitan police, as the sole means left me of procuring food and raiment, the attention of one of the principal chiefs of the force was attracted towards me by the ingenuity and boldness which I was supposed to have manifested in hitting upon and unraveling a clue which ultimately led to the detection and punishment of the perpetrators of an artistically-contrived fraud upon an eminent tradesman of the west end of London.

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