It was like playing whist with dummy.

However, as I have said, Lord Palmerston effectually cleared Crockford's, and it almost seemed, from the evidence of those who knew Crockford's best, that they never played anything there but old-fashioned whist for threepenny points, patience, and beggar-my-neighbour.

By this date Charles X, surrounded by his gloomy, ceremonial little court of faithful followers, was playing his nightly game of whist in the melancholy shelter of Holyrood, where he was to remain for the next two years, an insipid, sorrowful figure, distinguished by such dignity as unquerulous passivity can lend to the foolish and unfortunate.

He saw that his presence rather silenced the young men, and went away to play his rubber of whist at the club.

Laugh softly to yourself, Experience Book, and flutter your leaves just a bit as I write, that of their own volition, Miss Lavinia and Martin have drifted from whist to piquet, as by natural transition, and Evan is free for garden saunterings once more.

[Footnote 1: Walpole here speaks of whist as a game of but new introduction in Paris, though it had been for some time established with us.

"I need not ask you," he went on, "to be whist about this, since I have proof that you can keep a secret under trying conditions.

(N.B.When one's husband and father together take to serious whist of a moonlight night in spring, twins are not only an advantage but a necessity.)

It is the difference between whist over the library table and whist at the whist club.

There is a ruined castle, built by Miller, that would get him his freedom even of Strawberry [Walpole's own house at Twickenham]: it has the true rust of the Barons' Wars.' 'Mrs. Lyttelton forced me to play at whist against my liking, and her husband took away Johnson's candle that he wanted to read by at the other end of the room.