The Savannah morning news., 1902-07-05

least six or seven hundred years old,
for a distinct allusion to it has been
found in French of the thirteenth CEN
fury. The pile" has been variously
explained as due to the representation
of a column or pillar on the reverse
of ancient French coins, to an iron
tool called pile" used in stamping
money to the design of a ship which
once figured on the coinage of France,
and to half-a- dozen other origins; but
the fact seems to be that the pile"
has really no more definite meaning
than the tall of our common Eng
lish phrase. To search for a definite
origin or an exact explanation is about
as hopeful an undertaking as to hunt
for a literal tall on what the street
tosser would call a brown"
To play at cross and pile" that is,
to play at pitch and toll, is a very fire.
quent phrase in our older writers. The
remark made by a character in Shad-
wells old play of EPSON Wells" that
Marriage is no worse than cross l win,
pile you lose shows that the little
game now usually described as heads
l win, tails, you lose is no novelty.
Tossing is now considered very vul-
gar form of gambling, but of old it
was not unknown in the royal palace.
The wardrobe accounts of King Ed
ward III show that his Plantagent
Majesty borrowed five shillings from
Henry, the Kings baker to play
cross and pile" Indeed, this weak
est of monarchs seems to have made
a practice of borrowing small sums
from those around him, for other en-
tries read: Mem, paid to Barnard,
usher of the Kings chamber, money
which he lent the King, and which he
lost at cross and pile; to Monsieur
Robert VAUDEVILLE eightpence." Pitch
nd f0c ie ilav, 1f
times which have come down in the
world; but if kings no longer play
'heads or tails" the decision of mat
tiers o fsome Importance by the toss
of a coin has not been unknown in re-
cent times. Gambling by tossing is
very old; it has probably existed ever
since a coin was first made with diff
ferent designs on its two sides. The
Romans of long ago, instead of calling
head or tall cried Capita aut ma
VIA" i. e., heads or ships, the two
faced head of Janus being commonly
shown on one side of the coin, and the
prov of a ship on the other.
The aLtin phrase strange to say, has
been found in use in a distorted cor
rupted form among the country folk
of Normandy at the present day. The
Norman villagers toss a coin and cry
a strange and, to themselves, meaning
less farrago of words, which ,practi-
cally unspellable and almost unpro-
nounceable as they are to those un-
used to them, have yet distinct resem-
blance to the old Roman Capita aut
navia," of which they are doubtless a
survival.
Grecian boys played a similar game
of chance with sheEs. The shell
chosen as a medium for gambling was
smeared with pitch on one side, the
other remaining in its native white
ness, and when it was thrown up the
guesser called white" or black,
just as modern boys in the cricket
field sometimes call fiat or round"
when they throw bat into the air and
decide the order of innings by the
guess as to which side will be upper
most after its fall. The passion for
gambling seems to be as old as hu-
manity If Greek boys fused parti-
colored shells for tossing purposes,
their seniors were perfectly familiar
with the use of the dice, and coins or
their substitutes have been tossed and
dice thrown by the votaries of chance
all down the ages since the youth of
the world bloomed in Greece.