George Moore has protested that each man finds heaven in his own way, claiming characteristically that he himself discovered it in the bedroom of that mistress who was so faithless and so constant. And I could produce, as a witness in his defence, a parson of my acquaintance who has discovered heaven in the gallery at Lord’s. A small, wizened, weather-beaten parson, in a long chesterfield coat that looks in the sunlight sadly green; a guinea-pig, I suspect. For if he has a flock it can be rarely shepherded. A familiar, an unmistakable figure; I do not know his name, though we have chatted together once or twice. He carries always with him a little black notebook in which he enters every score of over fifty that he has ever watched. When a wicket falls and a new batsman walks down the pavilion steps, he takes out his book, verifies the newcomer’s identity with the aid of the scoring card and telegraph and proceeds to examine his record. “Ah, yes,” he says to his companion, “Miles Howell; a number of good innings he has played. Let me see--99 against Kent. I remember it; the silly fellow! Ran himself out: an impossible run. I don’t think he will ever make a hundred for Surrey; he gets so nervous in the nineties. Just the same at Lord’s in that big innings of his. He could have got the record easily; only another two runs. Then he flings away his wicket. After being missed, too, three balls earlier.” An old man he is, nearly eighty. During the war I used to wonder if I should ever see him again, whether he would be able to survive, at his age, four years of rationing and air raids and overwork. And no cricket. Very lonely, very much at a loose-end he must have been. Very many hours he must have spent studying that small black book of his, wondering whether the good days would ever return in his lifetime. But he was there on the 16th of May, on the first morning of the Notts _v._ Middlesex match at Lord’s. And his little black book was in his hand. “Ah, yes,” he was saying; “A. W. Carr--now the last time I saw him play was against Surrey on the Tuesday before the war. Thirty he made, if I remember. And out to a remarkably good catch, too, in the slips. They brought a telegram to him while he was batting, recalling him to the colours, I expect. A month later he was wounded.” I think that more than anything else, the sight of that old man in that Armistice summer, reassured me of the changelessness of the human heart, of its stability under altering conditions. And I think it was on that day I first appreciated the native wisdom of that old man.