est in the game, until in 1854 the
Philadelphia Cricket Club was organized, with J. Dickinson Sergeant
(who still fills the office) as president, William Rotch Wister as
secretary, and Hartman Kuhn (third), James B. England, Morton P. Henry,
Thomas Hall, Thomas Facon, Dr. Samuel Lewis, William M. Bradshaw, Henry
M. Barlow, R. Darrell Stewart, S. Weir Mitchell and (last, but not
least) Tom Senior among its founders. Then came the Germantown Club, of
native American boys, organized in 1855, whose highest ambition, for
many years, was to play the Philadelphia Club, "barring Tom Senior,"
then the only fast round-arm bowler in the country. Next came the
Olympian, the Delphian, the Keystone Cricket Clubs, and a host of lesser
lights, whose head-quarters were at West Philadelphia; and soon after
the now famous Young America Cricket Club was formed by the lamented
Walter S. Newhall, partly as a training-club for the Germantown. Well
did it fulfill its purpose until the breaking out of the war, when the
members of the Germantown Club changed the bat for the sabre almost in a
body, and the club went out of existence.

With calmer times the old love of cricket came back, and through the
energy of Mr. Charles E. Cadwalader the Germantown Club was reorganized,
and the _esprit de corps_ was such that before the club had taken the
field the roll showed more than twice its former numbers. Through the
spirit of its patrons, and especially by the kindness of H. Pratt
McKean, Esq. (part of whose country-seat was tendered for a
cricket-ground), the new life of the Germantown Cricket Club was
successfully inaugurated on the 17th of October, 1866, by a victory in
its opening match with the St. George Club of New York. That was a
red-letter day, when Major-General Meade, on behalf of the ladies of
Germantown, and amid the huzzas of thousands of its friends, presented
to the club a handsome set of colors, and, hoisting them to the breeze,
alluded in his own graceful style to the memories of the past, and the
achievements which he predicted the future would witness on this
magnificent cricket-field.

But what is cricket? Descriptions of lively things are apt to be dull,
and it is indeed no easy task to render a detailed description of
cricket intelligible, much less entertaining, to the uninitiated. The
veriest enthusiast never thought the forty-seven "laws of cricket" light
reading, and, resembling as they do certain other statutes whose only