to batting, there is little that is pleasant to confess. As soon as
I got a distant view of a ball, I was ever tempted to whack wildly in
its direction. There was no use in waiting for it, the more I looked
at it the less I liked it. So I whacked, and, if you always do this,
a ball will sometimes land on the driving part of the bat, and then it
usually happened that my companion, striving for a five or a six, ran
me out. If he did not, I did not stay long. The wicket-keeper was a
person whose existence I always treated as _une quantite negligeable_,
and sometimes the ball would bound off his pads into the stumps. The
fielders would occasionally hold a catch, anything _may_ happen. On
the other hand there was this to be said for my style of batting,
that the most experienced Cricketer could not tell where or in what
direction I would hit any given ball. If it was on the off, that was
no reason why I should not bang it to square-leg, a stroke which has
become fashionable since my time, but in those old days, you did not
often see it in first-class Cricket. It was rather regarded as "an
agrarian outrage." Foreigners and ladies would find Cricket a more
buoyant diversion if all the world, and especially LEWIS HALL and
SHREWSBURY, played on my principles. Innings would not last so long.
Not so many matches would be drawn. The fielders would not catch cold.

To speak of fielding is to revive unspeakable sorrows. For a
short-sighted man, whose fingers are thumbs, no post in the field
is exactly grateful. I have been at long-leg, and, watching the game
intently, have perceived the batters running, and have heard cries of
"well fielded!" These cries were ironical. The ball had been hit past
me, but I was not fortunate enough to observe the circumstance. A
fielder of this _calibre_ always ends by finding his way to short-leg.
A prudent man can do a good deal here by watching the umpire, dodging
when he dodges, and getting behind him on occasion. But I was not
prudent. I observed that a certain player hit very much behind the
leg, so there, "in the mad pride of intellectuality," I privily
stationed myself. He _did_ it very fine, very fine indeed, into my
eye. The same misfortune has attended me at short-slip; it should have
been a wicket, it was a black eye, or the loss of a tooth or two, as
might happen. In fact, I sometimes wonder myself at the contemptuous
frankness of my own remarks on the fielding at Lord's. For if a catch
c