Our great annual event is, of course, the Married _v._ Single match, which takes place on the last Saturday of the season. In the old days, when we played on the Common, this was the occasion of what one might almost describe as a village orgie. Men turned up from everywhere, who never honoured the club with their patronage at other times, some even dressed, most appropriately, as clowns, and the cricket was distinctly of the “Dan Leno at the Oval” variety. Well, well, _Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis_. It was doubtless very amusing, but there were objections, latterly even objectors (whether of the conscientious variety or not doesn’t matter), and the present tea-tent is in every way preferable to its rival “down the road.” So we play on our own field now, and get a very fair amount of amusement out of it, even without the clowns. I have tried for years to get up some sort of a representative married team before the day of the match, but it’s no use. They are all too old, or too stiff, or too busy. Yet when the eventful afternoon arrives, there are generally some fourteen or fifteen Benedicts ready to do battle for the honour of their wives and families, against a meagre dozen or so of the less fortunate Bachelors. Public enthusiasm, at all times keen in village cricket, reaches its high-water mark on this great day, and the ladies especially assemble in large numbers to do honour to the brave. Sympathy is invariably and entirely with the married men—I suppose because part of the audience are the wives of the team now stripping for the fray, and the other part hope that by next summer at latest they will be in the same proud position. On paper there can be no question that the Bachelors have the strongest side, but against their youth, their practice, and their skill we place our experience and our considerable numerical advantage, so there is not much in it. Then again, they look rather contemptuously at our weather-beaten ranks; say we have no bowling, can’t run (two of us are over seventy, certainly!), and are altogether as sorry a collection of prehistoric peeps as ever took the field. _Nous verrons!_ The Bachelors win the toss and start batting. An old man of sixty-seven, who has recently contracted a second matrimonial alliance to make sure of his place in the team, asks to keep wicket, and after buckling on a pair of lovely old faded yellow pads, he goes to say “Good-bye” to his new “missus,” and get her to pull his waistcoat down and stuff it inside the back of his trousers (this I saw myself). Then I arrange the rest of my veterans in a sort of inner and outer circle round the wickets, in places where they are least likely to be hurt, and the game begins. It is true we have no bowling, in the modern sense of the term, but it’s quite good enough for the Bachelors. At one end I put on our village umpire, who bowls fast straight underhand, literally “daisy-cutters,” and at the other a newly-married groom, just come into