Before the war I had always felt that he was sadly neglecting his duty to his congregation. He watched cricket all the week; he thought cricket all the week; what could he find to say to his flock on Sundays? But I learned on that first day of post-war cricket that as long as you see life steadily in terms of something, you can acquire a true sense of human values, and that county cricket is as serviceable a spade as literature if you would unearth the absolute. Someone, I half think that it was Flint, had just missed Saville rather badly. The old man shook his head. “Poor, poor,” he muttered, “and they were a bad fielding side in the eighties.” Suddenly I saw the parson’s life in relief. He had seen life in terms of county cricket. He had seen in the varying fortunes of the field as surely as has the historian in the rise and the crash of empires, the arrogance and impermanence of success, the courage of despair, the vanity of ambition. He had seen men rise to fame and sink into mediocrity. Counties had had their hour. There had been the years of Surrey’s domination, then of Yorkshire’s, then of Kent’s. Middlesex was now the rising power. There was all history in his recollection of “Nottingham’s weak fielding in the eighties.” And I felt that he would be able to give true wisdom to his flock on Sunday; he would not be easily misled by the shouting in the market-place; he would have a sense of values. He would have a norm with which to judge the traffic and confusion of modern life. We are children, he would say, with the child’s right to choose such toys as please it; or rather, perhaps, we are in search of some trumpery half-crown clothes-peg on which to hang the sixty guinea fur-lined coat of our immortal natures. One must have a peg; but it is the coat, and not the peg, that matters. And so back upon my traces. Habits are good things; a framework gives purpose to one’s life, and cricket and football make as good a hat-rack for literature and romance and friendship as the routine of a civil servant or a bank clerk or an income-tax surveyor. There must be a background for bright colour, and that is mine. III