A favourite trick of some slow bowlers is to bowl from different distances. Sometimes the bowler will have one leg behind the wickets and the other in front, and sometimes both behind; we have even seen some bowl occasionally with the front leg as much as two yards behind the wicket. The object of this is to deceive the batsman as to the pitch of the ball by changing the distance the ball has to travel. This is doubtless an excellent theory, but in our opinion it is not of much worth in actual practice. We have seen bowlers of all sorts repeatedly try this experiment, but in our experience it never meets with any appreciable success. This is perhaps owing to the fact that the batsman can always see very clearly when the bowler does not come up the whole way to the wicket, and is accordingly on the alert for a shorter pitched ball than usual. The only practiser of this trick who ever seems to turn it to good account is Tom Emmett, the left-handed Yorkshire veteran; he usually bowls his slow wides from some distance behind the crease, and certainly obtains a fair share of wickets with these balls; but even in his case we think that it is generally not so much the difference in the distance that the ball has to travel which causes disaster to the batsman, as the latter’s anxiety and impatience to score from slow wide off balls, which look so easy and are really so deadly. However, though our opinion of this bowler’s ‘dodge’ is not particularly high, we still think it is worthy of trial at times by every slow bowler. A slow bowler should try every wile that can possibly be attempted; by adopting slow bowling he has undertaken to use the ‘wisdom of the serpent’ in the guise of the ‘harmlessness of the dove,’ and has sacrificed pace to cunning and thought. No slow bowler is worth his salt who merely tosses the ball into the air and trusts to chance for success, even if it has a little spin on it; he must continually think and diagnose every particular case which comes before him, and then adopt the measures necessary for each one. With this object it is the duty of every slow bowler to take advantage of any local peculiarity which the size and situation of the ground may afford. He should almost always have the choice of ends, except on occasions when the captain of the side considers that for some reason his fast bowler is more likely to get rid of the batting side for a small score than the slow, and then, of course, the fast must have the choice.