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.