vital point. I have not been dependent on
hearsay for one single fact in this story. Where my experience does not
depend upon personal experience, it has been received from the
principals themselves. Finally, it should be remembered that when I
have, imaginatively, put words into the mouths of the persons of this
story, they are never essential words which affect the issue. The
essential speeches are reported from first-hand sources. For instance,
Ginger Stott himself has told me on more than one occasion that the
words with which I closed the last section, were the actual words spoken
by him on the occasion in question. It was not until six years after the
great Oxfordshire match that I myself first met the man, but what
follows is literally true in all essentials.

There was a long, narrow strip of yard, or alley, at the back of Mrs.
Stott's paper-shop, a yard that, unfortunately, no longer exists. It has
been partly built over, and another of England's memorials has thus been
destroyed by the vandals of modern commerce....

This yard was fifty-three feet long, measuring from Mrs. Stott's back
door to the door of the coal-shed, which marked the alley's extreme
limit. This measurement, an apparently negligible trifle, had an
important effect upon Stott's career. For it was in this yard that he
taught himself to bowl, and the shortness of the pitch precluded his
taking any run. From those long studious hours of practice he emerged
with a characteristic that was--and still remains--unique. Stott never
took more than two steps before delivering the ball; frequently he
bowled from a standing position, and batsmen have confessed that of all
Stott's puzzling mannerisms, this was the one to which they never became
accustomed. S. R. L. Maturin, the finest bat Australia ever sent to this
country, has told me that to this peculiarity of delivery he attributed
his failure ever to score freely against Stott. It completely upset
one's habit of play, he said: one had no time to prepare for the flight
of the ball; it came at one so suddenly. Other bowlers have since
attempted some imitation of this method without success. They had not
Stott's physical advantages.

Nevertheless, the shortness of that alley threw Stott back for two
years. When he first emerged to try conclusions on the field, he found
his length on the longer pitch utterly unreliable, and the effort
necessary to throw the ball another six yards, at first upset his s