The two boys strolled at Sunday pace down over the hot, sunny field, which wore its air of Sabbatical and empty leisure. May had been a wet month, and the grass still retained the varnished freshness of spring except where in patches it had been worn by pitches or practice-nets. But for the last fortnight no rain had fallen, and the light soil, quick to dry, was beginning to get hard and give bowlers such as David the crumbling wickets in which his soul delighted. Adams’s house had scraped through the first ties of house-matches, for though David, on whom they relied to thwart and discomfit their opponents, had proved on that occasion to be extremely expensive, and quite useless as a bowler, he had in some weird fashion of his own managed to make fifty of the most awful runs ever scored, chiefly by amazing miss-hits over the heads of point and slips. He had also been badly missed off the first ball he received, which added humour to the performance, and a little later his leg-stump had been smartly hit, though without displacing the bails. (He had hailed this with a shriek of laughter.) But in the second tie played last week he had shown himself in truer colours, and had been bowled fair and square in both innings without scoring at all, but had done things with the ball that really seemed inspired by Satan. He had grown into a bowler of the googliest type, and had discovered, all for himself, that if he let his shirt-sleeve wave in the air instead of rolling it tight up round his elbow it presented a much more puzzling outline to the batsman.[1] On that day there had been, too, a high cross-wind, and all that most of the batsmen who were favoured with his deliveries knew was that from very far off an immense lanky figure came prancing in a curved run up to the wickets, and that from somewhere at the end of clothes hung up to dry a quavering object that was supposed to be a cricket-ball skidded through the air in such a manner that it was really impossible to tell what it was doing or what it would do. Sometimes when it looked most charged with incalculable waywardness it did nothing but bounce as an innocent and rotund ball should; at other times (chiefly when it looked almost pathetically guileless) it played the lowest tricks that the laws of spin permitted. It kicked out like a horse when it pitched, or it leaped nervously aside as if trying to avoid the bat: in fact, the odds were that it did precisely what you didn’t expect. Or, again, the demoniac Blazes would run up to the wickets with less than his usual prance, but in a slow and thoughtful manner as if he had a headache. But if the wary batsman imagined (as he not unfrequently did) that this was the prelude to a slow and thoughtful ball, he occasionally (though not always) found he was quite in error. An extremely fast and straight ball was all that the thoughtful manner meant, whereby we learn the danger of trusting to appearances. And what