nnoisseurs of what Abel and Hearne and Brockwell can and cannot do.
If a man wants to sing the praises of cricket as a national game, let him
go down to one of the Public Schools and watch its close or cricket-ground
on a half-holiday: fifteen acres of turf, and a dozen games going on
together, from Big Side down to the lowest form match: from three to four
hundred boys in white flannels--all keen as mustard, and each occupied
with his own game, and playing it to the best of his powers.
_Playing it_--mark you: not looking on. That's the point: and that's what
Wellington meant by saying--if he ever said it--that Waterloo was won upon
the playing-fields at Eton. In my old school if a boy shirked the game he
had a poor time. Say that he shirked it for an afternoon's lawn-tennis:
it was lucky for him if he didn't find his racquet, next day, nailed up on
the pavilion door like a stoat on a gamekeeper's tree. That was the
sporting spirit, sir, if the sporting spirit means something that is to
save England: and we shall not win another Waterloo by enclosing
twenty-two gladiators in a ring of twenty-two thousand loafers, whose only
exercise is to cheer when somebody makes a stroke, howl when some other
body drops a catch, and argue that a batsman was not out when the umpire
has given him 'leg-before.' Even at football matches the crowd has _some_
chance of taking physical exercise on its own account--by manhandling the
referee when the game is over. Sport? The average subscriber to Lord's
is just as much of a sportsman as the Spaniard who watches a bull-fight,
and just a trifle more of a sportsman than the bar-loafer who backs a
horse he has never clapped eyes on. You may call it Cricket if you like:
I call it assisting at a Gladiatorial Show. True cricket is left to the
village greens."

"Steady, old man!" protested the Boy.

"I repeat it. For the spirit of the game you might have gone, a few years
ago, to the Public Schools; but even they are infected now with the
gladiatorial ideal. As it is you must go to the village green; for the
spirit, you understand--not the letter--"

"I believe you!" chuckled young Dawkins. "Last season I put in an off day
with the villagers at home. We played the nearest market town, and I put
myself on to bowl slows. Second wicket down, in came the fattest man I
ever saw. He was a nurseryman and seedsman in private life, and he fairly
hid the wicket-keep. In the first over a ball o