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Inasmuch as any man requires years of study and practice say, of chess in order to play chess well enough to compete successfully with professional chess-players, it seems to follow that any man must require years of study and practice of the more complicated game of strategy, in order to play strategy well enough to compete successfully with professional strategists.

It means a knitting together of lives, a oneness, a confluence of soul and heart and passions, and a disposition to sacrifice, if need be. We have not been that way, and are not. We have been more like two chess-players. We have had a mutual pleasure in the game, but we have been none the less antagonists. The playing is over, that is all. It doesn't matter who has won the game.

In June, 1885, the chess societies of the Hartz districts held a "Schachcongress," or chess convention, at this appropriate place. Besides the regularly-appointed delegates, a large number of visitors came from various parts of Germany, many of whom were players of wide repute. Among the latter was Herr Schalopp, well known as one of the best chess-players of Berlin.

At the Dublin Exhibition he was greatly struck by a little cabinet picture by an Anglo-German artist, one Webb, and was eager to secure it, though he objected to the price. However, on the morning of his departure the secretary drove up on an outside car to announce that the artist would take fifty pounds, which Forster gave. This was "The Chess-players," which now hangs at South Kensington.

Half the chickens are dead and the other half sick. The days drag slowly. We have to depend mainly on books to relieve the tedium, for we have no piano; none of us like cards; we are very poor chess-players, and the chess-set is incomplete. When we gather round the one lamp we dare not light any more each one exchanges the gems of thought or mirthful ideas he finds.

Except for the comparative infrequency of the more bestial types of men and women, Judaea has always been a cosmos in little, and its prize-fighters and scientists, its philosophers and "fences," its gymnasts and money-lenders, its scholars and stockbrokers, its musicians, chess-players, poets, comic singers, lunatics, saints, publicans, politicians, warriors, poltroons, mathematicians, actors, foreign correspondents, have always been in the first rank.

It seemed but yesterday since she had watched with amused eyes the sherbet-sellers clanking their brass saucers, the carriers streaming the water from the bulging goatskins into the earthen bottles, crying, "Allah be praised, here is coolness for thy throat for ever!" the idle singer chanting to the soft kanoon, the chess-players in the shade of a high wall, lost to the world, the dancing-girls with unveiled, shameless faces, posturing for evil eyes.

For, if things turn out as he foresaw they would, it is because, as with great chess-players, he has accurately measured not alone the mechanical moves of the pieces, but the character and talent of his adversary, "sounded his draft of water," and divined his probable mistakes.

Music and talking sounded on all sides, but they made no impression on the chess-players. Lady Mary performed all her most brilliant airs and variations in vain, as far as Mr Gwynne was concerned; and Rowland was even unconscious that Netta had resolutely played through all the small pieces she had learnt at school at the particular request of Sir Hugh Pryse.

For Percy knew nothing of the organized attempt on Cornish's life which she herself had frustrated. He seemed to know nothing of the grim and silent antagonism that existed between the two men, shutting his eyes to their movements, which were like the movements of chess-players that the onlooker sees but does not understand. Dorothy knew that Von Holzen was infinitely cleverer than her brother.