TABLE WITH THE HOLLOW LEG, &c.
Formerly I knew men, apparently engaged in business, whose shops were,
in the upper apartments, extensive gambling establishments. There seems
a revival of this evil pastime at present. These men will invite
persons to call at their place of business, saying that they have there
a very nice room very retired, and secure from all intrusion, where
their friends can come and enjoy themselves in quiet, and plenty of
wine with which to regale themselves, but of those who go to such
places, none ever come out winners. In Doncaster a wine merchant had to
his shop such a room attached. He had a great number to play with him,
and all of them continually lost. Men who were professed gamblers here
found their tricks and artifices set at naught, and themselves losing
at every trial. They became dissatisfied, and suspected some
extraordinary trick being used. They combined, for the purpose of
ascertaining, and soon learned, from some person in his employment, the
whole secret. His card table was constructed with a hollow leg, and in
that leg, where the knee would rest against it, was fixed a small peg,
which would strike against his knee on a small wire being pulled. This
wire was attached to the peg, and passed out at the bottom of the leg,
and under the floor to the side of the room, thence up stairs directly
over the table. And from the centre of a fine moulding in plaster hung
a rich lamp ; the moulding was hollow, and so constructed that a man,
who was a secret partner, could be overhead, and see into the hands
below, and give his partner signs from above, previously agreed upon,
by pulling the wire. This advantage was sufficient to ruin any man who
played with him, and enabled him to make money faster than he would be
apt to do in the common course of honest business ; which, in fact, he
cared nothing about, only as a cover for his gambling. This man's
establishment was broken up, and he fled to the Continent.
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