Recollections of a scorer

"Everybody knows it's our business to score. You don't get a chance to get a bite of any thing, and you don't get to bed till two o'clock o' nights, but you're always being screamed at to bring the balls."

One day while a scorer is keeping tally in a billiard room, a well-dressed stranger comes through the door. Soon, the scorer finds in him a willing apponent. But the more the scorer wins, the more he wish they'd never started playing.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists. Tolstoy’s major works include "War and Peace" (1865–69) and "Anna Karenina" (1875–77), two of the greatest novels of all time and pinnacles of realist fiction. Beyond novels, he wrote many short stories and later in life also essays and plays.