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I doubt if there is a single pilgrim of all that host but can show a hundred fair pages of journal concerning the first twenty days’ voyaging in the Quaker City; and I am morally certain that not ten of the party can show twenty pages of journal for the succeeding twenty thousand miles of voyaging! There was no oratorical talent in the ship. When the ship rolled to starboard the whole platoon of dancers came charging down to starboard with it, and brought up in mass at the rail; and when it rolled to port, they went floundering down to port with the same unanimity of sentiment. We had to allow for the reeling of the ship to the right or the left. In a call-pocket game or straight pool, you can choose which ball to pocket. The cue ball is then placed behind the head string, and the game can begin. Behind the long dining-tables on either side of the saloon, and scattered from one end to the other of the latter, some twenty or thirty gentlemen and ladies sat them down under the swaying lamps, and for two or three hours wrote diligently in their journals.

Do you know-I reckon I’m as much as four thousand pages behind hand. The game is 100, and four can play at a time. Thus a tennis player may offer to play against his inferior with a selzer-bottle instead of a racquet; or a golfer to play with only one club; or a chess-player to make his moves without seeing the board. Scoring a carom also entitles the player to another shot, and his turn, or inning, continues until he misses, when it becomes his opponent’s turn. There are numerous varieties of each game-particularly of carom and pocket billiards. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.

"What do you find to put in it, Jack? The witnesses were stupid, and unreliable and contradictory, as witnesses always are. The purser was accused of stealing an overcoat from state-room No. 10. A judge was appointed; also clerks, a crier of the court, constables, sheriffs; counsel for the State and for the defendant; witnesses were subpœnaed, and a jury empaneled after much challenging. Of course it is easy to see if a green is on a level and if on a slope, what is billiards but it is by no means easy always to judge by the eye whether a green is faster or slower than its immediate predecessor. Then there is a third one which is the oldest, a fourth one distinguished for scholarship, a fifth for athletic records, a sixth because it has the finest chapel, a seventh for I know not what, and as there are at least fifteen of them, I have mixed them all up; I see only the castellated palaces in Perpendicular style, the huge quadrangles, where the pupils move about in black gowns and square tasselled caps, each of whom has his two or three rooms in the wings of these castles; I see the Gothic chapels disembowelled by Protestantism, the banquet-halls with a dais for the "masters" and "fellows," the venerable smoked portraits of earls, statesmen and poets, who went forth from there; I see the renowned "backs," i.e. the rear of the colleges above the river Cam, over which there are bridges leading to the ancient college parks; I float on the gentle river between the "backs" and the parks, and I think of our students, of their hollow bellies and their boots down-at-heel with trudging from lecture to lecture.

A nice way to see this "butterfly effect" for yourself is with a game of pool or billiards. The regulation size of an 8ft pool table in Australia is approximately 88 inches and 44 inches wide. For home or personal use, pool tables typically measure 6′ x 3′. If you have limited space, you can have the table customised to fit your room, but most Australians prefer 7′ x 3.5′. As you may already know, pool tables measure differently depending on the location where you’re playing. Some reading was done; and much smoking and sewing, though not by the same parties; there were the monsters of the deep to be looked after and wondered at; strange ships had to be scrutinized through opera-glasses, and sage decisions arrived at concerning them; and more than that, every body took a personal interest in seeing that the flag was run up and politely dipped three times in response to the salutes of those strangers; in the smoking-room there were always parties of gentlemen playing euchre, draughts and dominoes, especially dominoes, that delightfully harmless game; and down on the main deck, "for’rard"-for’rard of the chicken-coops and the cattle-we had what was called "horse-billiards." Horse-billiards is a fine game.