Lord Hawke’s was the fourth English team to go to South Africa, Major Wharton, W. W. Read, and Lord Hawke himself having in previous years taken out sides. In any review of South African cricket, the first thing to be remembered is that, from one end of the great continent to the other, you never by any possible chance see a grass wicket, matting being used everywhere. On the Newlands ground, Cape Town, and at Port Elizabeth, the matting is stretched over grass, and this makes a wicket which enables the bowler to get considerable work on, though the ball does not come off the pitch very quickly. It is not an easy wicket, for a half-volley does not seem the same thing as on grass, and forcing strokes generally are at a discount. This kind of wicket affords most excellent practice, for it teaches one above everything else to watch the ball. Tyldesley did make a very fine 112 at Cape Town, and Sinclair, the South African cricketer, an equally fine 106, but the ball nearly always beat the bat, and Haigh in particular brought off some great bowling triumphs. The work he used to get on the ball was prodigious; he thought nothing of pitching six inches outside the off stump, and then hitting the leg stump. Trott, too, did one or two fine performances, while Rowe, Middleton, and Sinclair were at times almost equally successful. At Port Elizabeth the out-field is of grass, but the wicket seemed to me even more difficult than at Cape Town, for the ball, besides taking a lot of break, turned very quickly. Perhaps, however, I am unduly influenced by the fact that I made “spectacles” at Port Elizabeth—a favourite ground, by the way, for Englishmen to fail on, for more than one well-known cricketer has “bagged a brace” there. Cape Town and Port Elizabeth are the only two cricket grounds in South Africa which can boast of a grass out-field; all the other grounds are absolutely innocent of a blade of grass, being nothing, indeed, but a brown-reddish sand—somewhat like the colour of the sand on the seashore—rolled into a flat and hard surface. The matting is stretched on this sand, and makes a hard, true, and very fast wicket, while the ball, once past a fielder, simply flies to the boundary. The Wanderers’ ground, Johannesburg, is by far the best ground in South Africa, for the wicket is exceptionally fast, and the out-field level and true. At Kimberley there is a good wicket, but the out-field is rather rough, which may be said with truth of nearly all South African grounds, except the Wanderers’. Natal we did not visit, but I am told that the Maritzburg Oval is in almost every respect the equal of the Wanderers’ ground. [Illustration: _A STATE MATCH._ _The Duke of Wellington bowling out Lord Brougham._]