I do not know if those were the correct names of the gentlemen referred to, or only fancy ones by which they were known to their friends; but he laid his hand on two of his followers and hauled them to the front. One was a long, weedy youth, who, one saw at a glance, was more than half an imbecile; and the other was a portly old gentleman of fifty-five or six, with a corporation like a barrel. Mr. Sapsworth intervened. "What's that?" he cried. "We've got Hedges!" He brought Mr. Hedges forward. I could not but feel that, to say the least of it, Mr. Hedges balanced Mr. Sprouts. If Mr. Hedges could run more than a dozen yards without pausing to take breath, I was almost ready to express my willingness to eat my hat. "But we've only got ten men," persisted Mr. Barker. "You'll only have to have ten. If you think we're going to play against your eleven we won't play you at all, so that's all about it." There was a prospect of unpleasantness even before the match began. It seemed that one of us would have to retire, in satisfaction of Mr. Barker's rather unjustifiable demand. I was about to retire myself--for I instinctively felt that, as a captain, I was no match for Mr. Barker--when a rather curious incident occurred. On a sudden a newcomer appeared upon the scene. I say on a sudden, for no one had noticed his approach, and yet, all at once, there he was, standing between the Latchmere captain and myself. To me at any rate his presence was so unexpected, and, indeed, so startling, that I stared. He seemed to have come out of space. He was a big, burly fellow, with smooth cheeks, round face, bullet-shaped head, and sleepy-looking black eyes. "Let me play for you?" he said. For a moment Mr. Barker stared at the stranger in surprise, in common with the rest of us. Then he jumped at the offer. "Let you! rather!" He thrust out his hand and caught the stranger's palm in his. But no sooner had he got it firmly gripped than he dropped it with an exclamation: "Why, what's the matter with you? Ain't you well? Your hand's as cold as a frozen corpse." I went a little aside with Mr. Sapsworth. "Who is he?" I asked. "I don't know, and yet I seem somehow to have seen his face before. But let them have him. He doesn't look as though he were up to much." He did not. Anyone looking less like a cricketer I have seldom seen. His costume was ridiculous. He had on a pair of large check trousers--a check of the kind which the Oxford tailor explained to the undergraduate was a _leetle_ too large to be seen to advantage on a single pair of understandings. He had on a huge top hat, of a size and shape which would have made the fortune of a "lion comique." A red woollen muffler was wound several times round his neck, and his capacious person was enveloped in an enormous overcoat, the like of which I had never seen before. The day promised to remind us of the torrid zone, yet Mr. Barker had cried out that the stranger's hand felt cold.