When the game is close, don't get excited and climb up on the table. It shows a want of refinement, especially if you are not a quick climber. While running a grand slam to cover, the best authorities, including Bob Carter, claim that you should breathe hoarsely through the front teeth, pausing from time to time to recite brief passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Never whistle while waiting for someone to play. Whistling is not in good taste. Go over and bite out a couple of tunes on the piano. When your opponent trumps an ace don't ever hit him carelessly across the forehead with the bric-a-brac. Always remember when you are in Society that bric-a-brac is expensive. If your partner bids five spades and you get the impression that he is balmy in the bean don't show it in your face. Such authorities as Fred Perry and Dick Ling claim that the proper thing to do is to arise gracefully from your chair and sing something plaintive, in minor chords. This generally brings your partner back to earth, because nine times out of ten he is only temporarily crazy with the heat. Don't lead the ten of clubs by mistake for the ace of trumps and then get mad and jump seventeen feet in the air because they refuse to let you pull it back. In order to jump seventeen feet in the air you would have to go through the room upstairs, and how do you know whose room it is? There, Gladys, if you follow these rules I think you can play the game of auction bridge without putting a bruise on the law regulating the income tax. P. S. When you play for money always bite the coin to see if it means as much as it looks. I hope Gladys wasn't offended. She hasn't sent me even a postal card containing thanks and a view of Chestnut Street. CHAPTER IX YOU SHOULD WORRY ABOUT GETTING THE GRIP Say! did you ever put on the goggles and go joy-riding with an attack of grip? It has all other forms of amusement hushed to a lullaby--take it from Uncle Hank. As a Bad Boy the grip has every other disease slapped to a sobbing stand-still. It's dollars to pretzels that the grip germ is the brainiest little bug that was ever chased by a doctor. I was sitting quietly at home reading Maeterlinck on Auction Bridge when suddenly I began to sneeze like a Russian regiment answering roll call. Friend wife was deep in the mysteries of Ibsen's latest achievement, "The Rise and Fall of the Hobble Skirt," but she politely acknowledged my first sneeze with the customary "Gesundheit!" Then she trailed along bravely with her responses for ten or fifteen minutes, but it was no use--I had more sneezes in my system than there are "Gesundheits!" in the entire German nation, including principalities, possessions across the sea, and the Musical Union. "John," she ventured after a time, "you are getting a cold!"