"Pack of cards" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in had gone home; but we suspected that Franziska had given the neighbours a hint not to overwhelm us on our first arrival. When we entered the big room, Franziska came in with candles; then she brought some matches, and also put on the table an odd little pack of cards, and went out. Her uncle and aunt had, even before we went out, come and bade us good-night formally, and shaken hands all round. They are early folk in ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... ordinary pack of cards and throw out the twelve court cards. Now, with nine of the remainder (different suits are of no consequence) form the above magic square. It will be seen that the pips add up fifteen in every row in every column, ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... amiable kinsman requested her to hold her jaw, and to bring the board if she was going to play, or to say as much if she wasn't. Urged by this gentle reminder, Mrs. Tadman immediately produced a somewhat dingy-looking pack of cards and ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... says I firmly. "I am a Methodist! I guess I can start off on a short tower, without takin' a pack of cards with me. And if I had 'em right here in my pocket, or a set of dominoes, I shouldn't expect to take up the time of the President of the United States a playin' games at this time of the day." Says I in deep tones, "I am a carrien' errents to the President that ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... to the subject in writing or in authenticated speech. Though he courted occasions for renown, he did not seek applause. His position as a Queen's favourite in any case must have brought aversion upon him. Tarleton, as he half acted, half improvised, is said to have shuffled a pack of cards, and pointed at him, standing behind the Queen's chair, an insolent innuendo: 'See, the knave commands the Queen.' The comedian, if the story be true, could reckon upon the support of a vast body of popular malevolence. Still, as a favourite, Ralegh only shared ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... not hang at all heavily on her hands; there was always an errand or two to be done for auntie, and always a pack of cards and a library book with which to fill the evening. Susan really enjoyed the lazy evenings, after the lazy days. She and Mary Lou spent the first week in April in a flurry of linens and ginghams, making shirtwaists for the ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... eyes at the grievous abomination of half-crown whist; and, indeed, had he been disposed to card-playing, he could not have indulged himself at Trimmerstone, for Mr. Sprout had banished almost all card-playing from the place, so that there was not a pack of cards in the parish, except two or three mutilated well-thumbed packs of quadrille-cards, which were still used by a knot of antiquated spinsters worthy of the good old days of Sacheverel and High Church. Quadrille-cards will not do for whist, for all the eights, nines, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... edge, as though he had never changed his position since the first time he had seen him. Shaky, the carpenter, looked up from the little side table at which he was playing "solitaire" with a greasy pack of cards; his face still wore the puzzled look with which he had been contemplating the maze of spots and pictures a moment before. Those others who were new to him turned on him curiously as they heard Slum's greeting, and Carney paused in the act of wiping a glass, an occupation which never failed ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... capabilities as a great medicine-man by performing a few very clever conjuring tricks before the king and his guests, which the simple Mangeromas regarded as absolute miracles. It was a stroke of sound policy on Earle's part; for after seeing him cause a pack of cards to vanish into thin air, extract coins—a few of which he still had in his pocket—from the hair, ears and noses of great warriors, and perform sundry other marvels, there was not a Mangeroma in all that great assemblage who did not regard the American as something superhuman, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... of the house and said, 'I got your message'; but when he had said that, he stopped, for an old mountainy man that had a shirt and trousers of unbleached flannel, and that was sitting by himself near the door, was looking at him, and moving an old pack of cards about in his hands and muttering. 'Don't mind him,' said the man of the house; 'he is only some stranger came in awhile ago, and we bade him welcome, it being Samhain night, but I think he is not in his right ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... same evening, as he happened to be looking through his writing table drawer with Puss beside him looking over his elbow, she spied a pack of cards, and then he was forced to pick them out to please her, then draw them from their case. At last, trying first one thing, then another, he found that what she was after was to play piquet with him. They had some difficulty at first in contriving for her to hold her cards and then to play ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... even the servants crowded into the room. All pressed round Hermann. The other players left off punting, impatient to see how it would end. Hermann stood at the table, and prepared to play alone against the pale, but still smiling Chekalinsky. Each opened a pack of cards. Chekalinsky shuffled. Hermann took a card and covered it with a pile of bank-notes. It was like a duel. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... signs of life were Mrs. Golden's pack of cards for solitaire, her worn, brown Morris-chair, and accretions of the cheap magazines with pretty-girl covers which Mrs. Golden ransacked for love-stories. Mrs. Golden had been reading all the evening before, and pages of newspapers were crumpled in her chair, not one of them picked up. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... want a bottle of whisky, the cork drawn and loose in the bottle, and a few dirty Scotch one pound notes; and, oh! has Mrs. Bower a pack of cards?' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... up my camera. Not quite satisfied, I left it about thirty yards away, to view the situation quickly, as there were only twenty minutes to go. Hardly had I left the machine than a "whizz-bang" fell and struck the parapet immediately above the ladder, tumbling the whole lot of sandbags down like a pack of cards. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... the Mulligan fraternity got out a pack of cards and proposed a game to while away the time. There was a young squatter in the carriage who looked as if he might be induced to lose a few pounds, and the sportsmen thought they would be neglecting their opportunities if they did not try to "get a bit to go on with" from him. ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... well—all three of them. William Bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. Had a Testament in his pocket when he came aboard; in a week's time he had swapped it for a pack of cards. I know ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... into the street, falls faint—and dreams her ball. Whereupon our authentic magician, coming to his own, lifts a curtain of her queer little mind and gives us an all too short glimpse of the state function, with an h-dropping, strap-hanging King and Queen out of a pack of cards; their disdainful Prince, who is none other, of course, than our policeman done into a bewigged Monsieur Beaucaire; a moody and peremptory Peer, Lord Times; the Censor (black-visored, with an axe); a grotesquely informal Lord Mayor; a bevy of preposterous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... still another poker story. Sam Bugg, the Nashville gambler, was on a Mississippi steamer bound for New Orleans. He came upon a party of Tennesseeans whom a famous card sharp had inveigled and was flagrantly robbing. Sam went away, obtained a pack of cards, and stacked them to give the gambler four kings and the brightest one of the Nashville boys four aces. After two or three failures to bring the cold deck into action Sam Bugg brushed a spider—an imaginary spider, of course—from the gambler's coat collar, for an instant distracting ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... convenient support in the service of the public. It is certain that many other schemes have been proposed to me, as a friend offered to show me in a treatise he had writ, which he called, "The whole Art of Life; or, The Introduction to Great Men, illustrated in a Pack of Cards." But being a novice at all manner of play, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... up and carefully treasured, was a pack of cards, excessively dirty, and reduced to an oval form by repeated paring of their dilapidated corners. The lads were both much burned by the sun, their hands were anything but clean, and their long nails were edged with black; one had ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... without motion. That in his lodging there was a gold watch and a purse containing such and such money and a trunk containing such and such clothes, but no passport and no papers, except that on his table was a pack of cards and that he had written in pencil on the back of the ace of hearts: "To the authorities. When I am dead, pray send what is left, as a last Legacy, to Mrs. Lirriper Eighty-one Norfolk Street Strand London." When the gentleman had explained all this, which seemed to be drawn up much more methodical ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... man at the station greeted me, and it was my old theatre orderly at No. 7 Pretoria. We were very pleased to see each other. I fitted him out with a pack of cards, post-cards, acid drops, and a ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... duty. It is the simplest thing in the world to mark one of your pieces of paper with a red mark: whoever receives the marked paper undertakes the commission. All is quite fair, I say. Only you know, I dare say, the common, the pitiful trick of the conjurer who throws a pack of cards on the table, backs up. You take one, look at it privately, return it, and the cards are shuffled. Without lifting the cards at all he tells you that the one you selected was the eight of diamonds: why? It is no miracle: all the cards are eight of diamonds; ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... he said with an air of unconcern. "Is it trecks ye want, sir? Here ye are then," and he threw a pack of cards at John's feet. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the inn the timeworn pack of cards, thick with the grease of five years' contact with half-wiped-off tables, started a game ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in the dusty corners; a half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was all, except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the whole. One thing more, odd enough there: a wire cage, hung on the wall, and in it a miserable pecking chicken, peering dolefully with suspicious eyes out at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... to a cool place on the creek bank a hundred yards distant where they sat down. She then drew out of her pocket a dirty pack of cards and a bar of soap punched with holes to be used as ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... brought a pack of cards along to amuse him," answered Tortillard, in a cunning manner; "it will be a little change for him; he only plays at biting with the rats; in that game he always wins, and in the end ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... taking in his fellow-creatures, that he sometimes could not resist deceiving his own partner. Whist is a game which requires no ordinary combination of qualities; at the same time, memory and invention, a daring fancy, and a cool head. To a mind like that of Tiresias, a pack of cards was full of human nature. A rubber was a microcosm; and he ruffed his adversary's king, or brought in a long suit of his own with as much dexterity and as much enjoyment as, in the real business of existence, he dethroned a monarch, or introduced ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... round the clock, and awoke once more a sound man to see the Prince roasting the heart of the kid on an iron spit. Throughout the day we played with a greasy pack of cards to pass the time. About sundown Creagh joined us, Macdonald having stayed on Skye to keep watch on any suspicious activity of the clan militia or the dragoons. Raasay's clansmen, ostensibly engaged in fishing, dotted the shore of the ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... crossed the sea; some have abandoned the land as a livelihood. Of the few, the very few that still remain, still fewer abide in their original homes. Time has shuffled them about from house to house like a pack of cards. Of them all, I verily believe there is but one soul living in the same old house. If the French had landed in the mediaeval way to harry with fire and sword, they could not have swept ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... keep that hand and that same pack of cards on the table till I've had it looked over," said Ronicky Doone. "I've dropped a cold thousand to you, and you're winning ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... never heard of a room without a pack of cards before," said the Chevalier; "I will send for one to my ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... certain," replied her friend, "but it can't be much anyway, or I'd have seen it there," pointing to a pack of cards on the mantelpiece. "Wait a moment," she said suddenly, and then she knit her brows as if thinking very hard; "didn't the six of spades come out true? Yes, it did!" and she ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... Nature had built for these people, what could they be themselves but lordly, beautiful, brilliant, brave, and wise? We saw four Greeks on donkeys on the road (which is a dust-whirlwind where it is not a puddle); and other four were playing with a dirty pack of cards, at a barrack that English poets have christened the "Half-way House." Does external nature and beauty influence the soul to good? You go about Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands Shakspeare must have drunk in a portion ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... now, and will have it," he said meaningly, "and this is how I serve men who come between me and my revenge." He was shuffling a pack of cards as he spoke, and, with the words, he flung ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... after renewing, some weeks ago, the acquaintance he had had the happiness of forming with Skettles Junior, on the night when he burst the Blimberian bonds and soared into freedom with his ring on, called regularly every other day, and left a perfect pack of cards at the hall-door; so many indeed, that the ceremony was quite a deal on the part of Mr Toots, and a hand at whist on the part of ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... vehicles were loiterers, with broad gold chains across their chest and half-closed eyes. One of them came up to Lars Peter. "Are you doing anything tonight?" said he. "There's a couple of us here—retired farmers—going to have a jolly evening together. We want a partner." He drew a pack of cards from his breast-pocket, and began ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... between drinking and gambling. They seemed feverishly eager to throw away their piles of gold. Some of them flipped coins at ten dollars a throw. Others tossed dice. One group of four sat around a greasy pack of cards betting on which man would draw the ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... with Phrygian caps adorned with a tricolour cockade, lounged against the wall, or sat in groups on the top of piles of refuse that littered the street, with a rough deal plank between them and a greasy pack of cards in their grimy fingers. Guns and bayonets were propped against the wall. The gate itself had three means of egress; each of these was guarded by two men with fixed bayonets at their shoulders, but otherwise dressed like the ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Hans now led the way to his quarters, where he produced a table, chairs and a pack of cards. The four men ranged themselves around ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... joy, I will be breaking your ugly head with the foot of it." "Arrah, Murtagh!" said I, "would ye be breaking the head of your old friend and scholar, to whom you taught the blessed tongue of Oilien nan Naomha, in exchange for a pack of cards?" Murtagh, for he it was, gazed at me for a moment with a bewildered look; then, with a gleam of intelligence in his eye, he said, "Shorsha! no, it can't be—yes, by my faith it is!" Then, springing up, and seizing me by the hand, he said, "Yes, by the powers, sure enough it is Shorsha agra! ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... from under his bed a bottle, a cigar, and a pack of cards, "I'm going to have some fun, and do as I used to with the fellows in town. Here's some beer, I got if of the old man at the station, and this cigar; you can pay for 'em or Tommy will, he's got heaps of money and I haven't ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... that Dieskau's Iroquois, seeing Mohawks, their relatives, in the van, wished to warn them of danger. If so, the warning came too late. The thickets on the left blazed out a deadly fire, and the men fell by scores. In the words of Dieskau, the head of the column "was doubled up like a pack of cards." Hendrick's horse was shot down, and the chief was killed with a bayonet as he tried to rise. Williams, seeing a rising ground on his right, made for it, calling on his men to follow; but as he climbed the slope, guns flashed from the bushes, and a shot through the brain laid ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... is Alice, so please your Majesty," said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, "Why, they're only a pack of cards after all. I ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... invented a first-rate dodge of my own, that I intend to take out a patent for. Like all truly great inventions, it's no end simple. In the first place, look straight afore you, my little dear, and you will see this pack of cards, - all made of a size, nice to hold in ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... abandonment. And he need not be altogether idle, he reflected within himself afterwards, as he was riding home: he felt that he was possessed of sufficient energy and talent to make himself perfectly master of a pack of cards, to be a proficient over a billiard-table, and even to get the upper hand of a box of dice. With such pursuits left to him, he might yet live to be talked of, feared, and wealthy; and Barry's utmost ambition would have carried ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... towel. And he was not a particularly fastidious sergeant either, but he preferred a damp towel in his roll to damp clothes on his back. Every man knows the dreary halts in camp when the rain pours outside, or the regiment is held in reserve. For times like these a pack of cards or a book is worth carrying, even if it weighs as much as the plates from which it was printed. At present it is easy to obtain all of the modern classics in volumes small enough to go into the coat-pocket. In Japan, ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... you how," said Marmaduke eagerly, and the Giant put him on a shelf of the Earth close to his head. Then Marmaduke took from his pocket a little pack of cards and shuffled them. He explained the rules very carefully—Old Maid it was—and then dealt them to Ping Pong, Sing Song and Ah See, for they joined in the game, and to the Giant. In those thirty-foot fingers the tiny cards looked ...
— Half-Past Seven Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... had Monsieur de Trailles departed than Franchessini opened a pack of cards and took out the knave of spades. This he cut up in a curious manner, leaving the figure untouched. Placing this species of hieroglyphic between two sheets of paper, he consigned it to an envelope. On this envelope and disguising his hand the colonel wrote ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;—it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... to get?" he called after her suspiciously. The Girl made no reply. Rance made no movement to follow her, but instead drew a pack of cards from his pocket and began to shuffle them with practiced carelessness. But when a minute had passed and the girl had not returned, he called once more, with growing impatience, to ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... so please your Majesty,' said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, 'Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be afraid ...
— Alice's Adventures in Wonderland • Lewis Carroll
... pack of cards," declared Roddy. "As Alice said to the King and Queen, 'You're only ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... whom lay on heaps of straw, asleep, or, at all events, giving no sign of consciousness; others sat in the corners of the room, huddled close together, and staring with a lazy kind of interest at the visitors; two were astride of some planks, playing with the dirtiest pack of cards that I ever happened to see. There was only one figure in the least military among all these twenty prisoners of war,—a man with a dark, intelligent, moustached face, wearing a shabby cotton uniform, which he had contrived to arrange with a degree of soldierly smartness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... hat, but not to wear; I wear a sword, but not to slay, And ever in my bag I bear A pack of cards, but ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... You can be the most maddening thing in all the world! [Taking up a pack of cards, he lets them fall with a long slithering flutter] After behaving as you have this evening, you might try to make ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... were left alone, the gipsy produced, out of her chest, a pack of cards, bearing signs of constant usage, a magnet, a dried chameleon, and a few other indispensable adjuncts of her art. Then she bade me cross my left hand with a silver coin, and the magic ceremonies duly began. It is unnecessary to chronicle her predictions, ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... on the washstand, a half-emptied bottle and two glasses beside it, while a pack of cards lay scattered on the floor. Fully dressed, except for a coat, the sole occupant lay on the bed, but started up at Keith's unceremonious entrance, reaching for his revolver, which had slipped to the wrong side of ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... Firio, as if all the knowledge in the world had flashed into his head quicker than the hand of legerdemain could run the leaves of a pack of cards ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... might have been, perhaps, had not the Irish capital been in a state of complete dementia over the presence of the greatest Queen in the world. [*] Privately, I think that those nations in the habit of having kings and queens at all should have four, like those in a pack of cards; then they could manage to give all their colonies and dependencies a frequent sight of royalty, and ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... injustices that obliged me to stay in that hencoop, while the rest of the force went gleefully up the line to attend a ball game. I didn't count for much, while the decision in regard to the one who stayed rested in the hands of Fate. It was the manager's own pack of cards I cut. I can recall the look of sophisticated astonishment those rascals wore at my persistent bad luck. I found out afterwards that every mother's son of them had bought his ticket the day before. They had faith in that pack of cards. Most of the town had gone with them; this accounted for ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... been in the garden," went on Charlotte, reproachfully, "and flopped down like that when the Queen said 'Off with his head!' she'd have offed with your head; but Alice wasn't that sort of girl at all. She just said, 'I'm not afraid of you, you're nothing but a pack of cards'—oh, dear! I've got to the end already, and I hadn't begun hardly! I never can make my stories last out! Never mind, I'll tell ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... him reached the fateful sum of forty-three thousand. Rostov had just prepared a card, by bending the corner of which he meant to double the three thousand just put down to his score, when Dolokhov, slamming down the pack of cards, put it aside and began rapidly adding up the total of Rostov's debt, breaking the chalk as he marked the figures in his clear, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... table was a jenny for carding the lace. There was a pack of brown cardboard squares, a pack of cards of lace, a little box of pins, and on the sofa lay a heap ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... speaking, Felicie had taken from the mantelpiece the pack of cards with which her mother played every night, and was spreading them out ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... vingt-un begins," she says in soliloquy, "I've got a pack of cards to be dealt out here—among them ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... trees seemed to fall like a pack of cards before its irresistible current. After passing through the clearing made around the village, the force of the wind gradually abated, and in a few minutes died ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... citizen of Suburbia—might have to fight for his own hearthside and suffer the intolerable horrors of war while the roses in his garden were trampled down in mud and blood, and while his own house came clattering down like a pack of cards—the family photographs, the children's toys, the piano which he had bought on the hire system, all the household gods which he worshipped, mixed up in a heap of ruin—as afterwards at Scarborough and Hartlepool, Ipswich, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... of the divine quality of the rights derived from universal suffrage as contrasted with rights derived from inheritance, or, for that matter, with rights derived from a dice-box or the shuffling of a pack of cards? Considering what the usual origin is of 'tactical necessities' in politics, and what forces determine political 'combinations of all sorts,' is it going too far to say that the odds, so far as public interests are ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... says:—'I have wandered through all parts of Spain, and though in many places I have scarcely been able to procure a glass of wine, or a bit of bread, or any of the first conveniences of life, yet I never went through a village so mean and out of the way, in which I could not have purchased a pack of cards.' This was in the middle of the seventeenth century, but I have no doubt it is true ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... insulting word, Abellino instantly sprang to his feet, and flung the whole pack of cards ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... against him. It was truly the devil's own luck and no mistake. If only the luck would turn, he would quit the game of chance forever—cast off the ungrateful Dolores, and.... He drew a much-worn pack of cards from his breast pocket and began cutting them with a dexterity acquired through long years ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... evolution of the individual. Among such records explanatory of the supreme mysteries three stand out pre-eminent, all bearing witness to the same ONE Truth, and each throwing light upon the other; and these three are the Bible, the Great Pyramid, and the Pack of Cards—a curious combination some will think, but I hope in another volume of this series to be able to justify my present statement. I allude to these three records here because the unity of principle which they exhibit, notwithstanding their wide divergence of method, affords a standing proof ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Fairchild took a desperate resolution, "Why should not we call first? We'll never get acquainted in this way," which declaration Mr. Fairchild could not deny. And so she dressed one morning in her finest and drove round with a pack of cards. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... and in the Balkans. The front was on the Isonzo, but a flank of over 200 miles invited a thrust down one of the various passes towards Venice which, if successful, would cause the whole front to collapse like a pack of cards; and marvellous though the feats of Italian valour and mechanical ingenuity had been in the mountain fighting throughout the winter, they had not wrested the passes from Austria's hands. The attack was preceded by a bombardment which began on 14 May, and the scene ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... of their combat, the crowd would begin to dwindle away. The judges quick to understand the loss of trade after vainly trying to induce the litigants to new efforts, would gently and suggestively push under their hands a pair of dice boxes or a pack of cards and the dispute would sometimes end upon the throw of a die or the ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... to bring me their packs. I did not expect they would do it, for they would feel they had betrayed themselves by it; however, I was sitting with the matron, and heard a gentle tap at the door, and in came a trembling woman to tell me she had brought her pack of cards, that she was not aware how wrong it was, and hoped I would do what I liked with them. In a few minutes another came up, and in this way I had five packs of cards burnt. I assured them that so far from ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... the games of the youngsters are bad imitations of the sports of the white. Just as their fathers find joy in a greasy, blackened, imperfect pack of cards, throwing them down with significant gestures, but in absolutely perfect ignorance of the rules of any game or capacity to appreciate any number greater than three—so do the children make believe to play cricket with a ball worlds away from a sphere (for it is none other than a pandanus ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... threw himself on a sofa, where he sank back heavy-eyed and exhausted; and I, almost feared that he would drop into a coma, as the penalty of overstraining nature, until the sight of a pack of cards restored him as if by a ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... shadow that spread itself out before me, multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled itself like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square shoulders, the silk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; I found I was surveying this statesmanlike outline with a weak approval. "A MEMBER!" I felt the little ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... pathetic patience of old age; they were hoping something of the fete might come their way. Two women, in one of the low interiors, were more philosophic than their neighbors; if their stiffened knees would not carry them to the fete, at least their gnarled old hands could hold a pack of cards. They were seated close to the open casement, facing each other across a small round table; along the window-sill there were rows of flower-pots; a pewter tankard was set between them; and out of the shadowy interior came the topaz gleam of the Normandy ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... smiled Carlotta. "I don't care a snap of my fingers for any of the poor worms, though I wouldn't needlessly set foot on 'em. As for justifications I have a whole bag of them up my sleeve ready to spill out like a pack of cards when the time comes. You don't have to concern yourself in the least about them. Your business is to propose. 'Come, woo me, woo, me, for now I am in a holiday humor and like enough to consent'"—she quoted Tony's lines and, leaning toward him, lifted her flower ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... deal. They must be similar in attitude and size, but no exactness is necessary in either of these respects. Then, by a simple contrivance, I make two pinholes in each of them, to enable me to hang them up one in front of the other, like a pack of cards, upon the same pair of pins, in such a way that the eyes of all the portraits shall be as nearly as possible superimposed; in which case the remainder of the features will also be superimposed ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... with essences, whose fashion had passed away; neat little parcels of letters, each carefully labeled with the name of the writer; fragments of old newspapers; and a little heap of shabby, dilapidated books, each of which tumbled into as many pieces as a pack of cards in Robert's incautious hand. But among all the mass of worthless litter, each scrap of which had once had its separate purpose, Robert Audley looked in vain for that which he sought—the packet of letters written to the missing man by his dead wife Helen Talboys. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... groans of ruined players, as they passed out, their mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him impassive. He was the spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had noticed this sorry Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, "There is only a pack of cards in ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... got. So we chummed together; and he seemed a mighty pleasant sort of a cove for a bit. He was always a-talking, and had his mouth full o' big words. I never said nothing about what I'd got afore, and he never seemed to care to ask me. But it were all his deepness. One night he pulls out a pack of cards, and says, 'Let's have a game. Only for love,' says he, when he saw me look a little shyly at him. 'I'm not a gambler,' says he; 'I never plays for money.' So we has a game and a pipe together, and he pulls out a little flask of spirits, and we got very ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... Evans, now a sergeant of militia, was quietly reading his well-thumbed Bible, while others around him were shuffling a greasy pack of cards, and filling the air with reeking tobacco-smoke and strange soldiers' oaths. When a temporary lull, in the somewhat tumultuous variety of noises occurred, he lifted his stentorian voice in ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them—all sorts of little birds and beasts, as well as the whole pack of cards. The Knave was standing before them, in chains, with a soldier on each side to guard him; and near the King was the White Rabbit, with a trumpet in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the other. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... some scattered magazines from a small table, and was now seated there, negligently shuffling a pack of cards in ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... passed along, with great curiosity and interest. Here, four or five great hulking fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco smoke, were engaged in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer, or playing at all-fours with a very greasy pack of cards. In the adjoining room, some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers, yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age, writing, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... happened to set eyes on Hop Wah, who was sitting at a table, showing half a dozen miners some tricks with a pack of cards. ...
— Young Wild West at "Forbidden Pass" - and, How Arietta Paid the Toll • An Old Scout
... the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a little leaner." He does not say: "See these wild sons of the desert! How they must hate the new artificial life around them!" Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans playing cards with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the cafe! See! they have ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... one of his Mexican voyages,—Carmen Viosca had burned candles and prayed; sometimes telling her beads; sometimes murmuring the litanies she knew by heart; sometimes also reading from a prayer-book worn and greasy as a long-used pack of cards. It was particularly stained at one page, a page on which her tears had fallen many a lonely night—a page with a clumsy wood cut representing a celestial lamp, a symbolic radiance, shining through darkness, and on either side a kneeling angel ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... taken away, as it was at last, Mr Jonas produced a dirty pack of cards, and entertained the sisters with divers small feats of dexterity: whereof the main purpose of every one was, that you were to decoy somebody into laying a wager with you that you couldn't do it; and were then immediately to win and pocket his money. Mr Jonas informed them that these accomplishments ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... obscene, sometimes profane, but always so full of life, drollery, and mimicry that a more steady head than Fred's was needed to withstand the contagion. Dick had been to the theatre—knew it all like a book, and would take Fred there as soon as they got out; then he had a first-rate pack of cards, and he could teach Fred to play; and the gay tempters were soon spread out on their bed, and Fred and his instructor sat hour after hour absorbed in what to him was a new world of interest. He soon learned, could play for small stakes, and felt in ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... then, that the three thirsted to buy? There were many things, among them weapons of war, a pack of cards, more properly called Devil's books, blue bonnets suitable for Highland gentlemen, feathers for the bonnets, a tin lantern, yards of tartan cloth, which the deft fingers of Grizel would convert into warriors' sashes. Corp knew ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Christian mother can. She often talked to him, and moved him so deeply that he frequently vowed to lead a better life; but his pleasures were too tempting, and he fell back again into his old habits. His father presented him with a race-horse and a pack of cards, and he became known among his youthful companions as one of the most fearless riders and the luckiest fellow at cards in the county. The good mother wept and prayed all the more, and the boy hid his cards from her to keep her from ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... and in about four minutes, what had been a happy prosperous town was reduced to a smoking ruin, a shambles of dead bodies, and a hell on earth for the miserable beings who lived in it! Almost all the houses fell together; whole streets of them collapsed like a pack of cards, and the shock was so tremendous that in many cases even the bricks and stone of which they were made were ground to powder. Tens of thousands of people were buried before they could get into the streets, and their own houses, where they had been happy ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... picture, of some famous site, town, or temple; and the player should be able to remember the district and province in which the mentioned place is situated. The latest novelty in this line is a pack of cards with pictures upon them of the Russian war vessels; and the player should be able to state what has become of every vessel named,—whether sunk, disabled, or ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... effect, but an aspect of youth and even of mirth coming into the face as though the features were lighted up from within. Behind me stood a personage whom I could not see, for his hand and arm only appeared, handing me a pack of cards. So far as I discerned, it was a man's figure, habited in black. Shortly after the dream began, my partner addressed me, saying, "Do you play by luck or by skill?" I answered: "I play by luck chiefly; I don't know how to play by skill. But I have generally been lucky." In fact, I had already, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... into the smoking room in order to take the seat which Bertha had reserved for him, her husband and his wealthy hangers-on had their pack of cards lying idle upon the green felt. Herr Rath was continuing his discourse and his listeners, taking their cigars from their mouths, were emitting grunts of approbation. The arrival of Julio provoked a general smile of amiability. Here was France coming to fraternize with them. They ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... slack of which he had tucked under the edge of his blanket. His lips moved as he read, and now and then he broke off to glance mildly at Faed and the Snipe, who were busy beside the fire with a greasy pack of cards; or to listen to the peevish grumbling of Lashman in the bunk below him. Lashman had taken to his bed six weeks before with scurvy, and complained incessantly; and though they hardly knew it, these ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... bold height, with overhanging eaves like a Swiss cottage, and a wide handsome gallery outside every story. These colonnades make it look so very light, that it has exactly the appearance of a house built with a pack of cards; and I live in bodily terror lest any man should venture to step out of a little observatory on the roof, and crush the whole structure with one stamp of ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... to the table and from a drawer took a dirty pack of cards and a homemade cribbage board, with headless matches for markers. The third took from his pocket a folded newspaper and sat down at the window opposite Hiram. He at once began reading, and seemed not to be a companion of the other two. Hiram ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... the paraffin; the Captain, on the other hand, appeared to be very gloomy and unhappy; he sat silent all the time his daughter was present. As she was leaving the room Johnny tried to rouse him. "We might have a game," he suggested, looking towards a pack of cards that stuck out of ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... pack of cards being spread upon the table, with their faces downward, the four players draw for partners. Those who draw the two highest, and those who draw the two lowest, become partners. The lowest of ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... if he had seen a snake in his path. All alone with the billiards, the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs, Mr. Secretary Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning rapidity something that looked like tricks with his own personal pack of cards, which he always carried about in his pocket. Schomberg would have backed out quietly if Ricardo had not turned his head. Having been seen, the hotel-keeper elected to walk in as the lesser risk of the two. The consciousness of his inwardly abject attitude towards ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Some hundreds of ignorant foreigners, dissatisfied with the money in their pay envelopes, had marched out of the Clarendon Mill and attacked the Chippering and behold, the revered structure of American Government had quivered and tumbled down like a pack of cards! Despite the feverish assurances in the Banner "extra" that the disturbance was merely local and temporary, solid citizens became panicky, vaguely apprehending the release of elemental forces hitherto ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... we started with a bedding and a Hookah and a pack of cards and a big lamp. We made the bed (a mattress and a sheet) on a platform on the bank. There were six steps, with risers about 9" each, leading from the platform to the water. Thus we were about 41/2 feet from the water level; and from this coign of vantage we could ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... is Alice, so please your Majesty," said Alice boldly, for she thought to herself "why, they're only a pack of cards! I ...
— Alice's Adventures Under Ground • Lewis Carroll
... let us begin," said the soldier, gleefully, and pulling a pack of cards out of his pocket, he threw them on a chair and went away, returning ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... Matta, 'embrace me! for thou art unparalleled. I thought you only meant to prepare a pack of cards, and some false dice. But the idea of protecting a man who plays at quinze by a detachment of foot is excellent: ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... is worked by cutting and dealing cards or studying the palm of your hand. And the things which they tell you are the most silly and shallow babble in the world; a mess of phrases worn out over and over again. Here is a specimen, as gabbled to the customer over a pack of cards laid out on the table; anybody can do the like: "You face a misfortune. I think it will come upon you within three weeks, but it may not. A dark complexioned man faces your life-card. He is plotting against you, and you must beware of him. ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... her hands, the pack of cards vanishes] How lovely the weather is to-day. [A mysterious woman's voice answers her, as if from under the floor, "Oh yes, it's lovely weather, madam."] You are so beautiful, you are my ideal. [Voice, "You, madam, please me ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... his throat—a little spasm as he choked, and released his lips for a moment. Then the bottle slid from his nerveless fingers to the floor, and the liquor oozed away in a little brown stream; even Trent dropped his pack of cards and sprang up startled. For bending down under the sloping roof was a European, to all appearance an Englishman, in linen clothes and white hat. It was the man for ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... quarrelling over a dirty pack of cards. Among them was a girl who appeared to be very young and very pretty, was decently clad, and resembled her companions in no way, except in the harshness of her voice, which was as rough and broken as if it had performed the office of public crier. She looked at me closely, as if astonished ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fifty, of polished manners, who in a few months afterwards destroyed himself, said to me one day, "a ride out in the morning, and a warm parlour and a pack of cards in the afternoon, is all that life affords." He was persuaded to have an issue on the top of his head, as he complained of a dull head-ach, which being unskilfully managed, destroyed the pericranium to the size of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the inn the old pack of cards, greasy after five years friction on dirty tables, started a game of ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... conversant with the literature of playing cards will be the Knave of Clubs, shown in Fig. 2, which is one of the fragments of a pack of cards found, in 1841, by Mr. Chatto, in the wastepaper used to form the pasteboard covers of a book. These cards are printed in outline from wood blocks and the colour filled in by stencilling, a method employed in the manufacture ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... began to dawn on her that there was another side to this feverish devotion to work. Jack took a load of yams to Apia, and came back with fifteen silver dollars and a bolt of print for a dress. He went again, and returned with a sewing machine, a pack of cards, and a bottle of trade scent; still another trip, and lo! he towed behind him a fine new boat with Fetuao painted on the stern. Then she at last succumbed to the fascination of the white way. Paga! There were dollars in the ground, and ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... claim to their first introduction. I see that Mr. Caton exhibited at one of the meetings of the Archaeological Institute this season a curious little volume of small county maps, numbered so as to serve as a pack of cards (described more fully in the Archaeological Journal for September, 1850, p 306.), and which I regret ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... game of Cribbage differs from all other games by its immense variety of chances. It is played with the full pack of cards, often by four persons, but it is a better game for two. There are also different modes of playing—with five, six, or eight cards; but the best games use those with ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... broke the seal from a new pack of cards, dexterously spreading them across the table. His hands, Gordon saw, were extraordinarily supple, and emanated a sickly odor of glycerine. His companion's were huge and misshapen, but they, too, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 'Number One' significantly. "There are a lot of gold coins and dollars scattered about in the bottom of the boat, besides an open bundle containing a collection of watches and other jewellery; and, from the greasy pack of cards lying alongside these, I fancy they must have been playing for the plunder and quarrelled about the ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... square it among pies and broth. Now or never must music be in tune, for the youth must dance and sing to get them a heat, while the aged sit by the fire. The country maid leaves half her market, and must be sent again, if she forgets a pack of cards on Christmas eve. Great is the contention of Holly and Ivy, whether master or dame wears the breeches. Dice and cards benefit the butler; and if the cook do not lack wit, he ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... the foregoing, will have been recognized as our hero and Joe Crouch) continued to puff away at their pipes in silence, listening to the remarks of three men who were playing a drowsy game with a tattered pack of cards. ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... themselves on the turf—in a spot where the moon fell with a clear light—and Pepe Lobos, having drawn a pack of cards from his pocket, the lesson commenced. Between the ardour of the master and the docility of the pupil, the lesson was prolonged to such a time, that the Colonel, asleep between his two branches, could have dreamt all the dreams that might present themselves to his imagination before either ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... said Power; "but come, let us resume our game." At these words he took a folio atlas of maps from a small table, and displayed beneath a pack of cards, dealt as if for whist. The two gentlemen to whom I was introduced by name returned to their places; the unknown two put on their boxing gloves, and all resumed the hilarity which Dr. Mooney's ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... littered all over with playing cards, cigar ash, fragments of broken wine glasses. A half-empty bottle of champagne stood on the floor. Two empty ones, their contents emptied into some bowls of flowers, lay on their sides. Another pack of cards was scattered upon the carpet. A chair was overturned. There was every indication of a late-night sitting and a debauch. Last of all, Grant and Wingate between them carried the body of Lord Dredlinton behind the screen and ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said, "let us begin." From one of his bags he took a pack of cards. He sat at the table and shuffled them. "There are many games of patience," he continued. "They are all founded on averages and thousands of combinations, so intricate that the law of recurrence can be determined only by months of figuring. However, one can learn a patience without ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... friend, advancing with a pack of cards, asked if Miss Radford would kindly select one and tell him the description. "The Queen of Hearts? Nothing," said Bulpert's second friend, with a gallant bow, "nothing could be more appropriate." Miss Radford cried, ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... a little, which did not in the least disconcert Jose, and, rising, he moved a small table forward, opened it and then going to a cupboard in the wall drew from it a short, squat bottle, four glasses and a pack of cards. "Your room is just beyond this," he said, turning to Pearl. "Jose says that you will find everything ready for you. You must be tired. You ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... toothed, the merriest laughers known, The blackest haired of all the tribes of men. What trap can hold such cats? The Romany Has crossed such delicate palms with lead or gold, Wheedling in sun and rain, through perilous years, All coins now look alike. The palm is all. Our greasy pack of cards is still the book Most read of men. The heart's librarians, We tell all lovers what they want to know. So, out of the famed Chicago Library, Out of the great Chicago orchestras, Out of the skyscraper, the Fine Arts ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... Deblois said solemnly, 'Stop this, Sawyer, you have turned these fish into a pack of cards, and are fooling us all.' The men laughed heartily, and so should I if I had known what the point of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... order of them will endure, without a thought of the defensive, when the person afflicting them is protected from satire, we read in Memoirs of a Preceding Age, where the vulgarly tyrannous hostess of a great house of reception shuffled the guests and played them like a pack of cards, with her exact estimate of the strength of each one printed on them: and still this house continued to be the most popular in England; nor did the lady ever appear in print or on the boards as the comic type ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... simper between each repetition that might have melted a heart of stone. Behind Sophy's chair, and sticking calico-flowers into the child's tresses, stood the senior matron of the establishment,—not a bad sort of woman,—who kept the dresses, nursed the sick, revered Rugge, told fortunes on a pack of cards which she always kept in her pocket, and acted occasionally in parts where age was no drawback and ugliness desirable,—such as a witch, or duenna, or whatever in the dialogue was poetically called "Hag." Indeed, Hag was ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by any means obtain admittance. It ought to be a source of pride to my countrymen, that they are more of a marrying people than the English or French, and do not regard women in the same degraded light as a gambler does a pack of cards, that are to be shuffled and played with for a while, and then thrown away. Our naval and military officers are rather remarkable for their readiness to form matrimonial connexions; while on the other hand, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. There were feats of dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence and a regular daily competition to guess the vessel's progress; at twelve o'clock ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... their faces often with its paws, but the face of Puglioni Sin had kissed all over the mouth and chin. Their food was robbery and their pastime murder. All of them had incurred the sorrow of God and the enmity of man. They sat at a table with a pack of cards before them, all greasy with the marks of cheating thumbs. And they whispered to one another over their gin, but so low that the landlord of the tavern at the other end of the room could hear only muffled oaths, and knew not by Whom they swore ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... just the same; and after dinner too; though wine was drunk in abundance, and various rich meats eaten. At nine o'clock it was still the same. There being a lamp in the carriage, he swore they would take a pack of cards, and a bottle of wine; and with these things under his cloak, went down ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... are thus discharged, the Word of Command in course is to ground their Fans. This teaches a Lady to quit her Fan gracefully, when she throws it aside in order to take up a Pack of Cards, adjust a Curl of Hair, replace a falling Pin, or apply her self to any other Matter of Importance. This Part of the Exercise, as it only consists in tossing a Fan with an Air upon a long Table (which stands by for that Purpose) may be learned in two ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... so. I had brought a pack of cards in my pocket, and I thought that, as we were a partie carre, you might have your rubber after all. But I see that the enemy's preparations have gone so far that we cannot risk the presence of a light. And, first of all, we must choose our positions. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... a strange folk to you, and even among us there are those who shuffle the pack of cards and read the palm when silver has been put upon it, knowing nothing... But some of us ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... the pack of cards, ripped off the covering, tossed aside the joker (though, really, I ought to have retained it!) and began shuffling the shiny pasteboards. I dare say that those around me sat up and took notice. It was by no means a common sight to see a man gravely shuffling a pack of cards in a public restaurant. ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... Pole to spare her, saying, from a child upwards, she never could understand being read aloud to; and I dropped the pack of cards, which I had been shuffling very audibly, and by this discreet movement I obliged Miss Pole to perceive that Preference was to have been the order of the evening, and to propose, rather unwillingly, that the pool should commence. The ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... friend saw her face suffused with a wrath for which he was utterly unable to account. With a hazy idea that something had passed which he had not heard, he caused a diversion by sending Mrs. Church indoors for a pack of cards, and solemnly celebrated the occasion with a game of whist, at which Mrs. Church, in partnership with Mrs. Banks, either through sheer wilfulness or absence of mind, ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... him fetch a little table, she produced a pack of cards. She spread them out and she expounded. He was a quick study. By the time Mr Ffolliot came to take Mary's place he knew all the suits. By the time Mr Ffolliot had thoroughly confused him by a learned disquisition on the principles of bridge, Lady Campion's motor was announced, ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... he had invited friends for that evening, and the orders given had to be attended to. So the man went off into the town and bought the playing-cards, shaking his head as he walked back. "Don't seem much now for a pack of cards," he muttered, "but I'll be bound to say they'll cost the guv'nor a pretty penny. Wonder what he'd say to me if I told him the best thing he could do would be never to make another bet and never to touch a card again. I know—he'd ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... the hunting in one day this week?" he responds "Willingly; I have not a most pleasure in the world. There is some game on they cantons." Proceeding from "game" to "gaming" we soon run aground upon the word "jeu," which as we know does duty in French both for a game and a pack of cards. "At what pack will you that we does play?" "To the cards." Of course this is "A quel Jeu voulez vous que nous Jouions?" "Aux cartes;" and further on "This time I have a great deal pack," "Cette ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... eating than Cluny brought out an old, thumbed, greasy pack of cards, such as you may find in a mean inn; and his eyes brightened in his face as he proposed that we ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... earth people dig up names like Belinda Mary?" he mused. "Belinda Mary must be rather a weird little animal—the Lord forgive me for speaking so about my betters! If heredity counts for anything she ought to be something between a head waiter and a pack of cards. Have you lost anything'?" ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... was successful. He ended by proposing to Marya Dmitrievna a game of picquet. "What! on such an evening?" she replied feebly. She ordered the cards to be brought in, however. Panshin tore open a new pack of cards with a loud crash, and Lisa and Lavretsky both got up as if by agreement, and went and placed themselves near Marfa Timofyevna. They both felt all at once so happy that they were even a little afraid of remaining alone together, and at the same time they both felt ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... upon that platform, shaped like an altar, and Pierre at once drew out a pack of cards, shuffling them with his mittened hands. Then he knelt down and said, as he laid out the cards one by one till there were thirty: "Whoever gets the ace of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the plants that claim to be the Shamrock of St. Patrick. This is not a settled point, and at the present day the Woodsorrel is supposed to have the better claim to the honour. But it is certain that the Clover is the "clubs" of the pack of cards. "Clover" is a corruption of "Clava," a club. In England we paint the Clover on our cards and call it "clubs," while in France they have the same figure, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... the same thing. I, too, had my canonical hours, in the quarters of the life-guard: a cigar was the censer; a pack of cards, the hymn-book; and there were never wanting other devotions and exercises of a ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... cards to see whether Rodolphe will bring in any money. I should like to have a good breakfast with you, like we used to; that would not hurt me. God cannot make me worse than I am. See," she added, showing Marcel the pack of cards she had cut, "Spades—it is the color of death. Clubs," she added more gaily, "yes we shall have ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... unimportant role in directing the manner of a large majority of women. Moreover, it was not a moment to lose herself in speculation concerning this woman's capricious behavior. Her guests held the first claim upon her attentions. Indeed, here was Mrs. Worthington even now loudly demanding a pack of cards. "Here's a gentleman never heard of six-handed euchre. If you've got a pack of cards, Mrs. Laferm, I guess I can show him quick enough that it ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... spanker-boom sheet fouled the wheel; still, we managed to get the vessel round, but scarcely were the braces belayed and the ship on the starboard tack, when she struck the ground broadside on. She was a soft-wood built ship, and she trembled, sir, as though she would go to pieces at once like a pack of cards. Sheets and halliards were let go, but no man durst venture aloft. Every moment threatened to bring the spars crushing about us, and the thundering and beating of the canvas made the masts buckle and jump like fishing-rods. We then kindled a great flare ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... the rubber band in a pack of cards; take any other card from the pack and show it to the audience in such a way that you do not see and know the card shown. Return the card to the pack, but be sure and place it between the cards tied together with the rubber band. Grasp the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... that the place was very much altered since Dryden's time. The change had been for the worse. "Where you used to see songs, epigrams, and satires in the hands of every man you met, you now have only a pack of cards; and instead of the cavils about the turn of the expression, the elegance of the style, and the like, the learned now dispute only about the truth of the game." This is all confirmed by that traveller who took notes in London in 1722, and found there was playing at Picket at Will's ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... told me just before dinner!" I urged upon him. "Table the whole pack of cards: let us get ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... some twenty men sat about a long low office. They were, for the most part, middle-aged working men and sat in silence reading and smoking pipes. At a table pushed against the wall a bald-headed young man with a scar on his cheek played solitaire with a greasy pack of cards, and in front of him and sitting in a chair tilted against the wall a sullen- faced boy idly watched the game. When the three men came into the office the boy dropped his chair to the floor and stared at Ed who stared back at him. It was as though a contest of some sort ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... weapons. And he pulled out his valise, and spread on the table a pair of navy revolvers, a pair of shot-guns, a pair of duelling swords, and a couple of bowie-knives. He offered to serve as second for both parties, and to give the word when to begin. He also took out of his valise a pack of cards and a bottle of poison, telling them that if they wished to avoid carnage they might cut the cards to see which one should take the poison. Then he waited anxiously for their reply. For a little space there was silence. Then he became conscious of a tremulous shivering in one corner ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... is not a necessary part of productive enterprise. Typical gambling is the transfer of wealth on the outcome of events absolutely unpredictable, so far as the two gamblers are concerned. Examples are the shaking of unloaded dice or the honest dealing of a pack of cards, and the betting on prices in so-called "bucket-shops" by persons having no connection with the market of real things, and seeking to get something for nothing as ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter |
