Not a Soothing Pastime, but an Insidious Vice Recently Acquired By Kusancrnt Preys, Among the dictum accepted unquestioningly by a non-empiric mind along with the roundness of the earth, the downward pull of gravity and the relativity of time, is the statement that the game of Solitaire is a soothing pastime. Acting upon the unanimous consent of the high and low-browed, that diversion of cards has hitherto been relegated to Game remotely distant time when one, recovering peradventure from major operation, from brain fever or shelleshock, might need to be wooed gently back to an interest in ife again. We have thought of Patience" as the proper companion of gruels and custards, of "Canfield" as a fitting concomitant of egsnoggs and hushed fovt-falls.
To hold such a reserve against ennui, such a sedative for undue brain' fag, was like having money in the bank, a sort of super-insurance against mental pressure. For many. and many a year this cheering prospect robbed future brain-fags of their terrors and lent a rosy glamour to possible protracted convalescences. Then came disillusionment. But we: anticipate, restlessness or insomnia, as a knitter-up of the ravelled sleeve of leave, Nature's sweet restorer and all that sort of thing.
To be sure we gained a fact or two; but who would not rather have 1a pleasing illusion than a disagree lable reality? Now we know that lative, but a vices The First Mis-Step.
Upon a certain ill-fated day when our evil angel led us to state that we were, earing Salenice for nah nods of enforced Ieisure as ill-
Eeaith might sometime Iny pon us, a practical friend objected: "But you can't learn solitaire when you are ill. You must master it now so as to be able to enjoy it then."
We could not combat the reason of her remarks and so we wantonly' threw away ong long quiet evening. Which might so much better have eon devoted to letter-writing or novel-reading. And not that first evening alone! We had thought that we were to learn one or two of the iplest_ forms of Solitaire, so inaptly " termed "Patience," and tuck the accomplishment tidily away in some hidden drawer of our subconscious mind, to be left till called for. But no, upon this ill-starred evening we lightly forfeited our hitherto unshaken confidence in the efficacy of lonely buildings-up of, cards as a magic spell to dispel
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.