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Updated: May 23, 2025
They did not scrupulously confine themselves to a single sort of theft, as I hear is common among modern thieves. They were ready for anything, from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter.
'It was over about five minutes before you came in, replied that luminary pleasantly, as he played at an invisible game of pitch-and-toss with some half-sovereigns in his pocket. 'I received orders to have the church ready at five minutes to eight this morning, though I knew nothing about such a thing till bedtime last night.
'Ay, ay, come along then, Captain, said the fellow, with a contortion of visage which he intended to be a smile; 'and I'll tell you now to show you that I HAVE a conscience, as ye ca't d n me if I charge ye abune six-pence a day for the freedom o' the court, and ye may walk in't very near three hours a day, and play at pitch-and-toss and hand ba' and what not.
Pitchforking statesmen and tosspot reformers will be unable to play at pitch-and-toss with reputations not submitted for the performance. In short, the congenial asperities of debate will be so mitigated that the honorable member from Hades will retire permanently from the hauls of legislation. "Public opinion," says Buckle, "being the voice of the average man, is the voice of mediocrity."
I am well aware that this vibrating house exaggerates every sound during the silence of night; but all the same, I am puzzled to know what my mousme can be doing. Chink! chink! is she amusing herself with quoits, or the 'jeu du crapaud', or pitch-and-toss? Nothing of the kind!
"Good fellow, Strong ain't he, Miss Bell?" Sir Francis would say to her. "Plays at ecarte with Lady Clavering plays anything, pitch-and-toss, pianoforty, cwibbage if you like. How long do you think he's been staying with me? He came for a week with a carpet-bag, and Gad, he's been staying here thwee years. Good fellow, ain't he? Don't know how he gets a shillin' though, begad I don't, Miss Lauwa."
At first I concluded that here was a relic of the brief colonial prosperity of the Bahamas, when its cotton lords lived like princes, with a slave population for retainers days when even the bootblacks in Nassau played pitch-and-toss with gold pieces; but as I considered further, it seemed to me that the style of the architecture and the age of the building suggested an earlier date.
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects.
"Well, then, east, ye see, we have the muirs," said Alan. "Once there, David, it's mere pitch-and-toss. Out on yon bald, naked, flat place, where can a body turn to? Let the red-coats come over a hill, they can spy you miles away; and, the sorrow's in their horses' heels, they would soon ride you down. It's no good place, David; and I'm free to say, it's worse by daylight than by dark."
It is idle to talk, as exaggerating sensation-paragraphists sometimes do, of stealing the pennies off the eyes of a dead grandmother to play at pitch-and-toss, or forging the name of a buried father to a note and then allowing it to go to protest, it is idle to talk of these as the extreme of criminal heartlessness: the men who could thus trade the men who have thus traded, during the whole war on the public patriotism and the public necessity, would deserve the lowest deep in the pit of perdition, following upon leprosy in life and deaths on dunghills if there was not a still deeper guilt on the souls of those who first plunged the country into war and then murdered it by treason or inefficiency.
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