Sport: Billiards

A few years ago no gentleman built a country house without putting in a billiard room. Now those billiard rooms have been turned into breakfast rooms, gun rooms, dens. Billiards, no longer smart, is played and watched now only by people who really like it. In no sport except championship golf is there the same concentration of spectators on a delicate feat of skill, the success of which depends entirely on nervous control—as when, in a room filled with smoke, and banked on four sides by retreating slopes of intense watching faces, a billiard player in a stiff shirt and evening...