Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/214

198 customers at playing the usual games, as skittles or back-gammon, cards ordominos, by means of all the tricks and turns to be found in each, which they most sedulously acquire of pedestrian professors. Does it not savour strongly of the Swindler, for a man to sit hours upon the stretch at the Bagatelle board, to learn of a Sharper how to accomplish any given number? So that the next customer that comes to play with him is quite certain of losing, whatever the stakes may be?

But crying as are those evils for redress, they vanish into smoke before the superior magnitude of permitting public houses to be kept by men who have been had up for imputed crimes! Returned lags, though they are the best defined villains, are not more dangerous than those whose doings are known to subject them to the laws. They dare not object to any thing that may be proposed; witness he in High Holborn, who permitted the cart-load of hosiery to be unlade at his house of a Sunday morning, which had that night been stolen from a shop? and all this against his better judgment; for the adage is not a good one, which says "the more public the more private." Again, I know that Georgey Cn, in Tottenham Court Road, was desirous