r of engendering it in others. He has a
word "gaby," which he will sometimes enlarge to "stuppid gaby," the
which, flung neatly into a man who has just missed a catch, will fill
the same with a whirl of furious curses difficult to restrain. And if
perchance one should escape, my ancient cricketer will be as startled as
Cadmus at the crop he has sown. And not only startled but pained at
human wickedness and the follies of a new generation. "Why can't you
play without swearing, Muster Gibbs?" he will say, catching the
whispered hope twenty yards away, and proclaiming it to a censorious
world. And so Gibbs, our grocer and draper, and one made much of by the
vicar, is shamed before the whole parish, and damned even as he desired.

To our vicar, a well-meaning, earnest, and extremely nervous man, he
displays a methodical antagonism. Our vicar is the worst of all possible
rural vicars--unripe, a glaring modern, no classical scholar, no lover
of nature, offensively young and yet not youthful, an indecent
politician. He was meant to labour amid Urban Myriads, to deal with
Social Evils, Home Rule, the Woman Question, and the Reunion of
Christendom, attend Conferences and go with the _Weltgeist_--damn
him!--wherever the _Weltgeist_ is going. He presents you jerkily--a tall
lean man of ascetic visage and ample garments, a soul clothed not so
much in a fleshy body as in black flaps that ever trail behind its
energy. Where they made him Heaven knows. No university owns him. It may
be he is a renegade Dissenting minister, neither good Church nor
wholesome Nonconformity. Him my cricketer regards with malignant
respect. Respect he shows by a punctilious touching of his hat brim,
directed to the sacred office; all the rest is malignity, and aimed at
the man that fills it. They come into contact on the cricket-field, and
on the committee of our reading-room. For our vicar, in spite of a
tendency to myopia, conceives it his duty to encourage cricket by his
participation. _Duty_--to encourage cricket! So figure the scene to
yourself. The sunlit green, and a match in progress,--the ball has just
snipped a stump askew,--my ancient, leaning on a stout cabbage stick,
and with the light overcoat that is sacred to umpires upon his arm.

"_Out_, Billy Durgan," says he, and adds, _ex cathedra_, "and one you
ought to ha' hit for four."

Then appears our vicar in semi-canonicals, worn "to keep up his
position," or some such folly, nervous about th