Four shillings apiece for the umpire’s and scorer’s “dinner” may seem expensive in these modern half-crown days, but judging from the next entry, we can only consider it an exceptionally moderate occasion. On 21st September of the same year, when, if we may judge by 1902, the summer was just beginning, the same entry reads:— Dinner for ditto, scorer, and beer £0 11 0 Whether the extra 3s. represents the amount of liquid refreshment required by the umpire and scorer alone, or in conjunction with those acting in similar capacities on the other side, whose integrity they thus thought to drown, does not transpire from the account. All these and many other like interesting matters are at the disposal of the gentleman who may still do for Kent cricket what Lord Alverstone and C. W. Alcock have done for Surrey in their _Surrey Cricket_, just published; but I must not break through my self-imposed rule and enlarge any further on these exploits of bygone days. Good old Kent! Where is the historian that shall do justice to your past glories? Or is it that the part is after all greater than the whole, and that when Philip Norman finished _West Kent Cricket_, there was nothing left unsaid? Now of all the various sorts of cricket that are played in and out of this country, I am prepared to maintain against all the writers in this or any other book that village cricket is at once the most amusing to watch, the most exciting to play, and of the greatest educational value to the English race. Notice, I do not call it the most scientific form of the game, though there is a special sort of science required to finish a match between 3 and 7 P.M. every Saturday afternoon! Let us first compare it, from a spectator’s point of view, with county cricket; and it will help to emphasise my point if I quote one or two reports of county matches culled at random from the daily press in August this year:— Notts _v._ Kent, at Nottingham. “Kent, holding a lead of 91 runs on their first innings, did not hurry themselves unduly in their second venture. Dillon took forty minutes to register a couple of singles”! Leicester _v._ Sussex, at Brighton. “On Saturday, Dr. Macdonald was in three hours and three-quarters for 48 runs, having in the previous innings made 33 in about two hours. In other words, he was batting five hours and forty-five minutes for 81 runs”! And the poor reporter adds drowsily, “It was a terribly monotonous performance.”