ing just the same.

The M.C.C. opened with Joe and a man in an Oxford Authentic cap. The
beginning of the game was quiet. Burgess's yorker was nearly too much
for the latter in the first over, but he contrived to chop it away,
and the pair gradually settled down. At twenty, Joe began to open his
shoulders. Twenty became forty with disturbing swiftness, and Burgess
tried a change of bowling.

It seemed for one instant as if the move had been a success, for Joe,
still taking risks, tried to late-cut a rising ball, and snicked
it straight into Bob's hands at second slip. It was the easiest
of slip-catches, but Bob fumbled it, dropped it, almost held it a
second time, and finally let it fall miserably to the ground. It was
a moment too painful for words. He rolled the ball back to the bowler
in silence.

One of those weary periods followed when the batsman's defence seems
to the fieldsmen absolutely impregnable. There was a sickening
inevitableness in the way in which every ball was played with the very
centre of the bat. And, as usual, just when things seemed most
hopeless, relief came. The Authentic, getting in front of his wicket,
to pull one of the simplest long-hops ever seen on a cricket field,
missed it, and was l.b.w. And the next ball upset the newcomer's leg
stump.

The school revived. Bowlers and field were infused with a new life.
Another wicket--two stumps knocked out of the ground by Burgess--helped
the thing on. When the bell rang for the end of morning school, five
wickets were down for a hundred and thirteen.

But from the end of school till lunch things went very wrong indeed.
Joe was still in at one end, invincible; and at the other was the
great wicket-keeper. And the pair of them suddenly began to force the
pace till the bowling was in a tangled knot. Four after four, all
round the wicket, with never a chance or a mishit to vary the
monotony. Two hundred went up, and two hundred and fifty. Then Joe
reached his century, and was stumped next ball. Then came lunch.

The rest of the innings was like the gentle rain after the
thunderstorm. Runs came with fair regularity, but wickets fell at
intervals, and when the wicket-keeper was run out at length for a
lively sixty-three, the end was very near. Saunders, coming in last,
hit two boundaries, and was then caught by Mike. His second hit had
just lifted the M.C.C. total over the three hundred.

* * * * *

Three hundred