Probably such a final as this had been seen before, but that did not detract from the tenseness of the excitement. The present position, arrived at through many delightful adventures, was that Adams’s wanted twenty more runs to win, with two wickets to fall. Maddox, luckily, was in still, and Cruikshank (a miserable performer with the bat) was in with him. If either of them got out, the forlorn and trembling David had to take his place, last wicket, to totter down the steps and walk apparently about twenty miles to the wicket, in the full light of day, with the eyes of the world on him. Maddox, of course, was the only hope of salvation; neither David nor Cruikshank could, even by their most optimistic friends, be considered as capable of doing anything but getting out against such strength of bowling as they had against them. And, in order to make David quite happy and comfortable about it all, there was indelibly written on the tablets of his memory the fact that he had got out second ball in the first innings “without,” as the school paper would record on Saturday, “having troubled the scorer. . . .” What if the paper added that in the second innings he proved himself as independent of the scorer again? So, while the groups of boys round him regaling themselves the while on bags of cherries and baskets of strawberries, seethed with pleasant, irresponsible excitement, David was merely perfectly miserable, as he waited for the roar that would go up round the field, to show another wicket had fallen. That would not be abruptly cut off like the tumult that succeeded a run or a piece of fielding: the Toveyites would go on screaming “Well bowled” or “Well caught” until he marched out across the field. All that he could think of in this hour of waiting was the fact that he had been completely bowled by the second ball he received in the first innings after having been completely beaten by the first. Tomlin, who had kindly sent down that fatal delivery, was bowling now, and no doubt he would be bowling still when he went in.