“The inferior houses of play are always situated in obscure courts, or other places of retirement, and, most frequently, are kept shut up during the day as well as at night, as if unoccupied, or some appearance of trade is carried on as a blind. A back room is selected for all operations, if one can be procured sufficiently capacious for the accommodation of forty or fifty persons at one time. In the centre of the room is fixed a substantial circular table, immoveable to any power of pressure against it by the company who go to play; a circle of inlaid white holly wood is formed in the middle of the table of about four feet diameter, and a lamp is suspended immediately over this ring. A man, designated the Groom Porter, is mounted on a stool, with a stick in his hand, having a transverse piece of wood affixed to its end, which is used by him to rake in the dice after having been thrown out of the box by the caster (the person who throws the dice). “The avowed profits of keeping a table of this kind is the receipt of a piece for each _box hand_,—that is, when a player wins three times successively, he pays a certain sum to the table, and there is an aperture in the table made to receive these contributions. At the minor establishments, the price of a _box hand_ varies from a shilling to half-a-crown, according to the terms on which the house is known to have been originally opened. If there is much play, these payments produce ample profits to the keeper of the house; but their remuneration for running the risk of keeping an unlawful table of play, is plunder.