r," he says, "seeing the late Harry
Stowell with an old beer barrel fixed on a trolley and filled with
water, wheeling it across the wicket. He would well douse the pitch, and
after running a small garden roller he had borrowed up and down a few
times the wicket was ready." This proceeding took place the day before
the match, so that batting must occasionally have been a venturesome
business. In those days a match meant what it still means in some
villages, an adjournment in the evening to the neighbouring inn, a
supper, beer, and songs. How many old inns still keep the name "The
Jolly Cricketers," and how many for little reason! In later days, Thames
Ditton cricket has become scientific enough. The Giggs Hill ground has
sent to the Oval cricketers like H.H. Stephenson, who was making
centuries for the county in the sixties; in modern times the great
Maurice Read, whom Mr. John Shuter has described as having "started a
new order among cricket professionals," learned his cricket at Thames
Ditton. But the greatest of all Thames Ditton cricketers is, of course,
Tom Richardson. He was actually born at Byfleet, but played as a boy at
Giggs Hill.

Thames Ditton's sister, Long Ditton, is probably known by sight by
thousands of people who do not know its name. You are looking at the
best of Long Ditton when you see Barr's nursery gardens from the train
window. There is hardly a month in the year, except in the deep of
midwinter, when the Ditton Hill gardens are not full of blossom. They
are never more glorious than in May and early June, when the long
parterres glow with the tall, late-flowering tulips. Of all flowers
which have been added to English gardens in the last twenty years, the
great thirty inch tulips seem to me the finest. A giant daffodil can be
superb, but it always looks like a giant. But these tulips have the
grace of slightness and the majesty of height; their open chalices burn
with the heat of jewels and the depth of the heart of wine; and here are
ten thousand of them. Perhaps the daffodils, earlier in the year, light
the gardens with a fresher lustre; but the tulips have the colour and
the glow. Railways have the good luck to run by many nursery gardens;
the tulips at Ditton Hill would help the South Western to challenge any
line.

On the other side of Thames Ditton ferry lies Hampton Court Park, a
noble stretch of ordered green. From the ferry to Hampton Court Bridge
is a mile by river, and nearly twice