At first we are not too sorry. Four months is a long time at even the best of games, and it is pleasant to think that in a fortnight’s time we shall be getting out our football jerseys and putting new bars upon our boots. It will be great fun going down to the Old Deer Park for the trial games and meeting our old friends. Soon the season will be really started, and every Tuesday morning will bring the yellow card: “You have been selected to play for ‘A’ XV _v._ Exiles, or Harlequins ‘A,’ or Old Alleynians.” And then on Saturday we shall let the District Railway carry us out to strange places--Northfields and Boston Manor--places whose names are familiar to us on the tubes, but are distant in the imagination, like Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, places where we never expect anyone to live. For members of an ‘A’ XV life is always an adventure; and then, when the game is over, and we sit back in the carriage lazy and tired, it is amusing to read through the soccer results in the evening paper and learn that at Stamford Bridge 40,000 people saw “Cock outwit the custodian and net the ball in the first three minutes.” And afterwards we go on to Dehem’s and meet our friends from the other games, and eat a great deal of roast beef, and drink a great deal of beer. Oh, yes, there are many compensations for the loss of summer! The autumn passes quickly and pleasantly, but towards Christmas there will come, as there always must come, an evening when we shall sit over the fire and remember suddenly that it is four months since we have held a cricket bat, that May is still a long way off, and the procession of Saturdays seems endless. On such an evening we take down _Wisden_ and, long after our usual bedtime, pore over the old scores. For _Wisden_ is the cricketer’s bible, though the unbaptized make mock of it. “What is it,” they say, “but a record? We can understand your wanting to look at the scores of matches that you have seen, that will recall to you pleasant hours in pleasant company. But what possible enjoyment can you derive from the bare figures and accounts of games you have never watched, on grounds you have never been to? It is no doubt an admirable work of reference for the statistician, but as literature, as a thing that is read for pleasure! why, it reminds us of the half-pay major who spent his evenings reading the Army List of 1860!”