eir homes boughs of trees, with
which they adorned their doors and windows. At Oxford the
quadrangle of Magdalen College was decorated with boughs on St.
John's Day, and a sermon preached from the stone pulpit in the
corner of the quadrangle; this was meant to represent the preaching
of St. John the Baptist in the wilderness.

At length the villagers, wearied with their exertions, retire to
their cottage homes, marching in procession from the scene of their
observances; and silence reigns o'er the village for a few short
hours, till the sunlight summons them to their daily toil.

CHAPTER VII.

JULY.

"Swift o'er the mead with lightning speed
The bounding ball flies on;
And hark! the cries of victory rise
For the gallant team that's won."

Cricket--Club-ball--Trap-ball--Golf--Pall-mall--Tennis--
Rush-bearing.

At this time of the year all the cricket-clubs in town and village
are very busy, and matches are being played everywhere. It may not
therefore be inappropriate if I tell you in this chapter of the
history of that game which has become so universally popular
wherever our countrymen live. On the plains of India, in Australia
(as some of our English cricketers have learnt to their cost), in
Egypt, wherever Englishmen go, there cricket finds a home and a
hearty welcome. But it is not nearly so ancient a game as others
which I have already mentioned, although it had some fairly old
parents, simple and humble-minded folk, who would have been greatly
astonished to see the extraordinary development of their precocious
offspring.

Kent and Sussex were the ancestral homes of cricket, which is thus
described by an old writer--"A game most usual in Kent, with a
cricket-ball bowled and struck with two cricket-bats between two
wickets. The name is derived from the Saxon word _cryc_, baculus, a
bat or staff; which also signifies fulcimentum, a support or prop,
whence a cricket or little stool to sit upon. Cricket play among the
Saxons was also called _stef-plege_ (staff-play)."

I fear that our old writer must have made a great mistake if he
imagined that the Saxons ever played cricket, and I believe that the
word was not known before the sixteenth century. In the records of
Guildford we find that a dispute arose about the enclosure of a
piece of land in the time of Elizabeth; and in the suit that arose
one John Derrick stated in his evidence that he knew the place