Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/210

194 All that has been said hitherto about insurances upon lottery numbers, must undergo revision. We might as well talk of carrying Thames water a horse-back to Islington, or of the advantage of hand spinning over the machines, as to describe the methods of obtaining insurances. Their baleful effects on the deluded wretches who were the victims of the practice, or of the circumventing policy of those who by means of pigeons contrived to do the insurers. Nearly all the regularly licensed lottery offices used to become insurers: some of them did a great deal, and employed a great many "collectors of numbers;" of whose activity you might form some judgment, by placing your back against the Mansion-house on the first morning of drawing, and turning eyes right, note the buz at the back doors in Lombard Street, when the first drawn ticket is announced. Although very little insurance can now be effected, on account of the new mode in which for several years the lotteries have been drawn, yet that little is attempted; and we heard with surprise that P. Dns, an amiable good sort of a regular foolish kind of a lottery office keeper, lost nearly all his property, by means of the old clumsy artifice of two poll one.