Crossword-Solution: SKITTLE 7 letters, 22 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 11

And then I was put errand-man at the Women’s Skittle Alley at the back of the ‘Tailor’s Arms’ in Casterbridge.

These, I am happy to state, exist no longer; and the fools who are always ready to be plucked, can only, in gambling, fall victims to the commonest and coarsest of swindlers; skittle sharps, beer-house rogues and sharpers, and knaves who travel to entrap the unwary in railway carriages with loaded dice, marked cards, and little squares of green baize for tables, and against whom the authorities of the railway companies very properly warn their passengers.

That the tradesman lost forty sovereigns will be easily understood; and did his tale end here it would have differed so little from a hundred others as scarcely to deserve telling; but it will surprise many, as it did me, to learn that he then walked to and from his own house--a distance of precisely a mile each way--fetched a bill for thirty pounds, which a customer had recently paid him, got it discounted, went back to the skittle-ground, and, under the same malignant star, lost the whole.

The instances revealed by exposure at the police-courts give but a faint idea of the extent of skittle sharping.

Taking but little interest in public affairs, they beguiled their time chiefly with such amusements as the Peacock afforded, which were limited to a bagatelle-board in the first floor, and a sequestered skittle-ground in the back yard.