And then again, when he has done a noble thing—or perchance it is his birthday, and the elements give heeding to his call—there falls, let us say, a gentle rain in the early-bird hours, and a hot sun scorches from 10 to 12. He has got his money on a two to one chance (and nobody else in the race)—Peel, Rhodes, Haigh, Jack Hearne, the wonderful George Lohmann, and dozens more. What does the other side make? They are lucky to make 100—lucky to make 70! To be a bowler on a bit of bird-lime is the biggest certainty the cricket world has knowledge of. You may meet a Ranjitsinhji, a Bonner, a Jessop, or a Frank Crawford; but if you don’t meet these, the odds on you are as the odds on an arc light to a farthing dip. Again—for a moment to raise the platform on which we have been discussing so casually this selfish side of the bowler’s existence—there can be little doubt that of the three branches of the game (batting, bowling, fielding), bowling is the pivot on which the other two turn. Who is the more use to his side—the great batsman or the great bowler? Nine out of ten intelligent beings answer unhesitatingly, the bowler; and rightly too, especially if he be of medium pace, or even slow medium, on a great variety of wickets, ranging from the fiery, cast-iron, stone-strewn rock of an Old Trafford wicket (I don’t mean for a second that the Old Trafford ground is often in this state, but when it is, it is a little faster, a little more susceptible of bump, than anywhere else I know) down to Bristol or Southampton after a wet day, he is invariably of supreme assistance to his side. And what a number of graduated shades of differing wickets there are, from the sun-scorched cracking clay, where the fast bowler finds your fingers, or failing these your ribs, where your runs are made through the slips or first hop over their heads to the boundary, down through the varying degrees of good, natural, fast wickets to the Valhalla of batsmen, let us say Taunton, the Oval, or Bristol, where the ball rarely rises stump high, and where there is as much life in the wickets as there is in a barrel of oysters! On grounds like these the batsman assuredly cometh into his own, and metaphorically layeth the bowler by the heel, bruising him hip and thigh through the weary hours of an August day, till the welcome news of the last over revives the rag of a man that is left, and he slowly wends his way to the rabbit-hutch, in sore need of the well-earned bath and its ensuing rub down—in sore need of a ginger beer. Perhaps there are too many of these superexcellent wickets; perhaps, from certain batsmen’s point of view, there are not. But the moment the rain appears, the bowler is another being; in the language of the card-room, he wears a four-ace smile, and there is a corresponding depression in the countenance of the great batsman. All down the still more numerous phases of wet, sticky, and real bird-lime wickets (impossible for