"Well, I suppose that you people are all excited over that new baby up at your house," I say pleasantly to A, just to show him that I can be gracious in victory as well as in defeat. "Let's see, is it a boy or a girl?" "It's _your lead_!" he replies shortly. "I beg your pardon," I say; "I certainly must be asleep to-night." And, as my thumb is on the 5 of diamonds, I lead it. "Here, here!" says A, "wasn't it the 5 of diamonds that you trumped in with just a minute ago?" That man has second-sight. As a matter of fact, I suspect that there is something crooked about him. "Yes, it is," corroborates B in her longest speech of the evening. X says: "Where _is_ that trick that we took?" And then it is discovered that it has found its way into my hand, from which it is disentangled with considerable trouble and segregated. As for me, I pass the whole thing off as a joke. "I saw in the paper this morning," I began when the situation has become a little less complicated, "where a woman in Perth Amboy found a hundred dollars in the lining of an old lounge in--" [Illustration: "'Here, here!' says A, 'wasn't it the 5 of diamonds that you trumped in with just a minute ago?'"] "It's your lead, if you don't mind," says A very distinctly. "You have made only one false start out of a possible three. Try again." I pretend not to hear this sarcasm, and, just to show him that there is life in the old dog yet, I lead my ace of spades. "Look here, my dear sir!" says A, quite upset by now. "Only one hand ago you refused spades and trumped them. That revoking on your part gives us three tricks and we throw up the hand." "Fair enough," I retort cheerfully, "three is just what you bid, isn't it? Quite a coincidence, I call it," and with that I throw my cards on the table with considerable relief. Nothing good could have come of this hand, even if we had played until midnight. From all sides now arose the familiar sounds of the post-mortem: "I had the jack, 10, 9, and 7, all good, but I just couldn't get in with them.... If you had only led me your king, we could have set them at least two.... I knew that Grace had the queen, but I didn't dare try to finesse.... We had simple honors.... As soon as I saw you leading spades, I knew that there was nothing in it," etc., etc. But at our table there was no post-mortem. Not because there had been no death, but there seemed to be nothing to say about it. So we sat, marking down our scores, until Dora came up behind me and said: "Well, dear, how is your game coming on?" As no one else seemed about to speak, I said: "Oh, finely, I'm getting the hang of it in no time." My partner muttered something about hanging being too good, which seemed a bit uncalled for.