Older Man With Bagatelle Board In Fairground Invites Visitors To Have-A-Go.

The bagatelle board that the older man had made and brought to the fairground, might not have been a means of him making a fortune, but perhaps from the money paid for the use of the bagatelle board, he might collect enough to pay for a meal or two. The stool he was sitting upon, and the bagatelle board he had in front of him, both appeared to be handmade. As people walked past him he would invite them to test their luck, for a few cents, and perhaps if it was their lucky day, they might win a dollar or two. The bagatelle board he was using might have looked like a child's toy, but for whatever reason, it seemed to attract some attention.

If you have no work, then you have no money, so you cant buy food or the other items needed to survive. The older man in the fairground might have been in this situation, but he appeared to have found a means of earning some money with the use of his homemade bagatelle board!

* *

** Bagatelle (from the Château de Bagatelle) is an indoor table game related to billiards, the object of which is to get a number of balls (set at nine in the nineteenth century) past pins (which act as obstacles) into holes. It probably developed from the table made with raised sides for trou madame, which was also played with ivory balls (Gloag 1969 illustrates a London design that was current in 1782) and continued popular into the later nineteenth century. Bagatelle is a precursor of the pinball machine (which is also descended from pachinko), and laterally related to miniature golf.
** Src: Wikipedia.org