Apart from its inviting to moderate and wholesome exercise, billiards, as popularly played, is pre-eminently a mental pastime. Nearly all its exponents of approved skill, whatever were the drawbacks of their youth, are intellectually quick and bright. This is due in some measure to the ready mathematical requirements of the play as a routine, but in a much greater degree to its taxing the eye, stimulating the fancy, and disciplining the mind by imposing watchfulness, invention, and analysis. Slowness is costly, and hence, as an early habit, an eager alertness of vision, alacrity of step, and promptitude of decision.

Regarding billiards as a spectacle, its physical requisites to perfection are keen sight, level head and steady hand; but they are by no means essential to enjoyment of it as a leisure-hour diversion en amateur. In this sense, its charm lies altogether in participation, which is all the more agreeable and healthful because never needing to be exhausting.

Caroming methods are still changing. Execution is again growing less fantastic and more practical. Systemization is becoming more and more dominant. In consequence, certain gathering shots, depicting instructive possibilities rather than downright needs, and diagrammed as still proper to teach when the earlier edition of this book was issued, have no place in the present volume.

Play has been made harder in theory, but easier in fact. Lowering the cushion first and the table next has facilitated most strokes, and particularly those dependent upon elevating the cue. Our fathers knew piquÉ, but seldom massÉ. Drawing a ball without hopping it has been made surer. Cloths were once so much heavier in nap that ironing new ones again and again, until the iron burned them out, was the method here, as it is in certain other countries yet. Although longer than the present ones by several inches, yet still choice cues of old rarely went beyond eighteen ounces. For special needs there are cues now whose butts alone are heavier than an old-fashioned cue in its entirety. The lighter ashen sticks of the past were meant for a greater variety of shots than the experts’ carom game of to-day has use for. Styles of play as a matter of contest are also different. If the present generation know better how to count, their elders knew better when not to try and count.

There has been progress in more directions than one. A light-weight cue never before handled by its wielder played the last 1900 points of a memorable contest. Our “Record” has no other one-night match so impressive for headwork, handicraft, and hazard. In the same year, and in the same State, a mile in harness was trotted in 2:19¾, but under wholly different conditions from those which to-day govern track, equipment, transportation, and individual effort. As in the popular eye some Cresceus or Lou Dillon now completely obscures the bob-tailed, homely little bay mare at Kalamazoo, so the billiard giants of these times are apt to overlook that the credit they receive for a marvelous progress as counters may not be exclusively their own. Some share in it is possibly due to improvements that first-class mechanicians have made in billiard implements. Rubber vulcanized in layers of different densities in the one strip have made cushion-angles trustier, cloths are of closer shear and more uniformly spread, choice cue-leathers are choicer, cues have grown magical in their mere heft of hilt, and vanished is the muslin under-cloth that helped the balls to dig their graves deep into the one of green. Rarely seen, if ever now, is the serrated cushion, with a face like a saw whose dulled teeth are set inches apart, and not often is there complaint that the speed of the bed is greater than that of the return from the cushion, or else not quite so great.