The best natural fast bowler, taken at the zenith of his fame, was Tom Richardson. Those of us that have watched him pounding away hour after hour and day after day at the Oval, have marvelled much at the wonderful natural spin, and have marvelled perhaps more at his inexhaustible energy and neverending fund of good-humour. He was never tired and never out of sorts, and when the wicket was badly broken I have known him time after time slacken his great pace for fear of injuring an opposing batsman. Always, and rightly too, one of the most popular players that ever stepped on to a cricket-field, still to-day, when perhaps his prime is past, there is no figure more welcome to the thousands that throng our grounds than the figure of “Long Tom,” as the crowds delight to call him. It was indeed a gustable tit-bit to watch him in 1894 bowl Essex out at the Oval, taking the whole ten wickets himself. A noteworthy fact in connection with Richardson, in the four years when he aggregated over 1000 wickets, was the great success he met with on all sorts and conditions of wickets. He could be quite as deadly in the slime or on a drying wicket as on the fieriest piece of asphalt. Now this ubiquitous wicket-taking is given to practically no fast bowler that I have ever seen, with the exception of Spofforth, and he did it not by bowling his usual great pace, as was the case with Richardson, but by slowing himself down to the speed of a Haigh or a Jack Hearne. It is the general opinion of many of our greatest cricketers—W. G. Grace and Ranjitsinhji, for example—that on a fast good wicket, and when bowling at the top of his form, we have never known the equal of Lockwood. Bowling with a long bouncing run, he can make the ball flick higher and faster from the pitch than any other bowler in this our third class. There is at times the very devil in it, and when the ball is not rapping incontinently at your fingers, it is hitting the middle and leg from well outside the off stump. One of the finest balls bowled that failed to get a wicket was bowled by Lockwood to Ranjitsinhji at the Oval three or four seasons ago. [Illustration: _From an Engraving Published in 1784._ _A MATCH AT THE GENTLEMAN’S CLUB, WHITE CONDUIT HOUSE, ISLINGTON._] I was standing at mid-off, and can see it to this day. Ranjitsinhji had just come in to bat, and was, I think, still on the mark. It was very fast; it pitched three to four inches off the off stump, and came back like lightning. I listened for the pleasing rattle of the sticks, but at the eleventh hour—no, I had better say the last hundredth part of a second—Ranjitsinhji’s right leg was bent across, and he received it full on the thigh. There was no other player living who, having failed to stop it with his bat, could have got his leg there in time. He certainly acquired a bruise, but the pain of this surely and swiftly dwindled in an innings of over 190!