Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/194

 and sacrifice their health, or even their lives, in pursuit of this worthless game.

Boating is a good deal practiced, but from want of skill many accidents attend it, and many are drowned in consequence.

Cricket, quoits, rackets, billiards, all have their votaries, while backgammon, cards, and chess attract the more sedentary.

It is much to be regretted that gambling, under many different forms, is too prevalent, and large sums of money are often staked on very trifling matters, e. g. heads or tails, the longest or shortest straw drawn from a thatched house; high points at cards, high stakes on horses to run at the Derby, and betting upon any circumstance that admits of a bet. Some young men render themselves a nuisance at a mess table by their pertinacity in offering bets. I need not say that gambling of all sorts is stringently prohibited by the authorities, and that a fortunate gambler, though a notorious character, is a very unenviable one.

When idleness and inactivity are so common, and apathy and ennui, like the dry rot in a ship of the line pervades the community, and entails disease, both bodily and mental, any rational amusement that would ventilate society, and give a fillip to the languid pulse of passing events, that would break the monotony of time, and set the moral elements into circulation, ought to be