"Two minutes' rest till the next man goes in! The tired arms lie with every sinew slack On the mown grass. Unbent the supple back, And elbows apt to make the leather spin Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin,-- In knavish hands a most unkindly knack; But no guile shelters under the boy's black Crisp hair, frank eyes, and honest English skin. Two minutes only! Conscious of a name, The new man plants his weapon with profound Long-practised skill that no mere trick may scare. Not loth, the rested lad resumes the game: The flung ball takes one maddening, tortuous bound, And the mid-stump three somersaults in air!" "Topping!" the Boy ejaculated. "Who wrote it?" "His name was Lefroy. He died young. He left Oxford a few years before we went up. And I think," continued Verinder, musing, "that I, who detest making acquaintances, would give at this moment a considerable sum to have known him. Well," he continued, turning to me and puffing at his pipe, "so you warn Grayson and me that we must prepare to relinquish these and all the other delights sung by Lefroy and Norman Gale and that other poet--anonymous, but you know the man--in his incomparable parody of Whitman: 'the perfect feel of a fourer'-- "'The thousand melodious cracks, delicious cracks, the responsive echoes of my comrades and the hundred thence resulting runs, passionately yearned for, never, never again to be forgotten. "'Overhead meanwhile the splendid silent sun, blending all, fusing all, bathing all in floods of soft ecstatic perspiration.' "--To all this we must say good-bye. And what do you offer us in exchange?" "Merely the old consolation that life is short, art is long; that while you grow old, cricket in other hands will be working out its perfection, and your son, when you have one, will start with higher ideals than you ever dreamed of." "And this perfection--will it ever be attained?"