Is not this a veritable caricature of cricket? Why, rather than watch such a game drag its dreary trail over three summer days, I would vow never to go near a ground again, and take to German skittles. Compare this “terribly monotonous performance” with the compressed interest of a whole match completed in four hours on a village green, with the supporters of each eleven shouting each other down, as the sun sinks all too rapidly in the western sky, and both runs and wickets are freely given away as the excitement rises to fever pitch. Which would you rather do, candid reader, if you had the choice? Stand on your hind legs in the field all one day, sit and smoke your tongue sore in the pavilion all the next, with a chance of getting a knock on the third, or join our village eleven on Saturday afternoon, and have four certain hours of unadulterated joy? Well, most of us would choose the county eleven, I suppose, though we should find it weary work. But here it strikes me I am poaching on other people’s preserves, and before I commit the indiscretion of mentioning country-house cricket, which is a subject my friend Mr. H. D. G. Leveson-Gower is treating in his usual masterly way, let me hasten back to my own little corner, from which I was an ass to stray. And yet, having gone so far, I ought perhaps to explain why I consider village cricket to be of so great an educational value to our race. And by education I do not mean the mechanical stuffing of an unwilling agent with knowledge for which he can never have any possible use, but rather the formation of all those characteristics which help to build up what we call a man—pluck, temper, self-restraint, respect for others, abnegation of self, _et hoc genus omne_. Now the people who play first-class cricket are divided into two categories—those with means and leisure who play for love of it and because they are good at it, and those who play because they are good at it and can make a living out of it; and though most of the above virtues can be cultivated to a certain extent in a team made up of these two classes, yet it is certain that the same spirit does not animate an eleven of amateurs and professionals as will work wonders in a village team made up of every rank in life, the parson, the cobbler, the squire’s son, and the blacksmith, all playing on an absolute equality, all playing for their side and not for themselves, all playing for glory and none for averages or talent-money.