With that I conclude. I could write more, if I ventured to trespass further on your attention. Should I have had the good fortune to divert and not to bore, I shall consider myself the luckiest in this band of writers, and after all, I have had the best of all topics. So, hurrah! and long life to country-house cricket! [Illustration: _From a Painting by Louis Belanger, belonging to H.M. the King._ _A VILLAGE MATCH IN 1768._] [Illustration] CHAPTER XII VILLAGE CRICKET By C. F. WOOD Constant readers of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ will not have missed a most amusing article on “Yokels at Cricket,” which appeared over the initials “R. E. M.” during the summer of this year of grace 1902. With a felicity of exaggeration which would do credit to Mark Twain, the writer describes his experiences on a pitch where the blocks were too large to begin with, and too numerous; where all that could be said of the fielding was that the men in the lost-ball region did their ferreting well; and where the fast ball shot, rose five feet, and shot again. Sometimes, he pathetically adds, the five-feet rise came last. Something of this kind possibly still exists in the remoter parts of our sportive country, but as it is my intention in the present paper to set down nothing about village cricket that has not come within the scope of my own experience, I must forego at the outset the attractions of these humorous irrelevancies, and speak the truth as far as I know it, even at the risk of making my contribution to this historic work unnecessarily serious. For the same reason I must deny myself the pleasure of dishing up once more the innumerable funny stories about village cricket that appear periodically in books of this kind; and I have further registered a solemn vow to leave the top-hat period severely alone, and make no reference to Fuller Pilch, Caffyn, Mynn, or any other belted heroes of prehistoric days. So what it comes to is this: I am going to put down here my own experiences and opinions of village cricket as it is played to-day by my own village eleven, of which I have the honour to be captain, and if the result turns out unsatisfactory and of little interest, kindly believe that the fault lies in my incapacity of expression, not in any lack of excitement in the cricket. _That_ at least is beyond reproach. Please don’t think from the above that, unlike the heroines of most of our modern stuffy plays, our club has no past! On the contrary, I have before me now the accounts of our village club right back to 29th July 1865, when we expended the sum of £1: 7s. in the following irreproachable manner:— Umpire £0 10 6 Dinner for ditto and scorer 0 8 0 Six _Bell’s Life_ papers 0 1 0 Stamps 0 1 0 Ball 0 6 6 ————————— £1 7 0