Note 17 — LECTURE III. —— THE PLAY OF THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH HAND. ——

I have worked it out myself in more than four thousand cases by rule of thumb (Field, October 1882), and obtained the same result; if in the teeth of this, early in the hand, a decent Whist-player plays the king second on a small card led, it is an unnecessarily high card; and as unnecessarily high cards are not played without an object, that object is presumably a call for trumps.