ndly knack;
But no guile shelters under the boy's black
Crisp hair, frank eyes, and honest English skin.
Two minutes only! Conscious of a name,
The new man plants his weapon with profound
Long-practised skill that no mere trick may scare.
Not loth, the rested lad resumes the game:
The flung ball takes one maddening, tortuous bound,
And the mid-stump three somersaults in air!"

"Topping!" the Boy ejaculated. "Who wrote it?"

"His name was Lefroy. He died young. He left Oxford a few years before
we went up. And I think," continued Verinder, musing, "that I, who detest
making acquaintances, would give at this moment a considerable sum to have
known him. Well," he continued, turning to me and puffing at his pipe,
"so you warn Grayson and me that we must prepare to relinquish these and
all the other delights sung by Lefroy and Norman Gale and that other
poet--anonymous, but you know the man--in his incomparable parody of
Whitman: 'the perfect feel of a fourer'--

"'The thousand melodious cracks, delicious cracks, the responsive
echoes of my comrades and the hundred thence resulting runs,
passionately yearned for, never, never again to be forgotten.

"'Overhead meanwhile the splendid silent sun, blending all, fusing
all, bathing all in floods of soft ecstatic perspiration.'

"--To all this we must say good-bye. And what do you offer us in
exchange?"

"Merely the old consolation that life is short, art is long; that while
you grow old, cricket in other hands will be working out its perfection,
and your son, when you have one, will start with higher ideals than you
ever dreamed of."

"And this perfection--will it ever be attained?"

"I dare say never. For perhaps we may say after Plato, and without
irreverence, that the pattern of perfect cricket is laid up somewhere in
the skies, and out of man's reach. But between it and ordinary cricket we
may set up a copy of perfection, as close as man can make it, and, by
little and little, closer every year. This copy will be preserved, and
cared for, and advanced, by those professional cricketers against whom the
unthinking have so much to say; by these and by the few amateurs who, as
time goes on, will be found able to bear the strain. For the search after
perfection is no light one, and will admit of no half-hearted service.
I say nothing here of material rewards, beyond reminding you that your
profes