You could pick out the members of the cricket-club committee amidst the crowd by reason of their grave, troubled faces; whereas all other faces wore the easy contented smile of the village Saturday night. We had weighty business to consider. The annual challenge had arrived from the Stavisham club. They were a cocksure, overweening lot, the town-eleven; and we had set our hearts on beating them at next Saturday’s match. But there was the hay to carry, if the weather held. Many of our best players would be in the fields. It looked as though the town were to add Windlecombe again to their long list of village victories. Secretary Dray gnawed savagely at the butt of his pen. ‘I knows how ’twill be,’ he said. ‘Five men an’ a tail o’ boys—the ould story! Tom here ’ull knock up his couple o’ score; and then ’twill be hout, hout, hout, fer th’ rest o’ us i’ two hovers. An’ I can jest hear they chalk-headed town chaps larfin’!’ It was a dismal picture. The fragrance went out of our tobacco, and no man thought of his ale. The three canaries carolled so joyously in their cages overhead, that I could have wrung their necks with all the pleasure in life. Young Daniel stared straight into the eye of the setting sun with the very face of disaster. ‘But ’tis th’ bawlin’,’ he went on. ‘Ne’er a change o’ bawlers, there’ll be; an’ me an’ George Havers caan’t go on fer ever. Na, na! ’tis all over agen, I tell ye! The boys ull ha’ their fun, an’ Windlecombe another smashin’!’ He swept the club papers into his pocket, and rose to fill a pipe. ‘But mind ye!’ he added, looking grimly round on the company, ‘I’ll ha’ that there flitter-mouse grocer-chap’s wicket this time, or I’ll be— Ah! you see if I doan’t, if I ha’ to throw at his ’ed!’ * * * * * Long after night had fallen, and all the village was quiet under the dim half-moon, I came out again upon the green, to wander and ruminate over the week that had gone by. I bared my arm to the biceps, and even in that disguising light I could see the sunburn dark upon it. Yawning and stretching involuntarily, a delicious ache spread over me from top to toe. The Seven Sisters loomed hard by, and I went and lay down at full length on one of the seats, looking up through the black wilderness of boughs at the flinching starshine, and watching the nightjars as they wheeled and whirred above me through the scented dark. They are a merry company, the nightjars. Perhaps there is no other sound in Nature that comes nearer to pure mirth and jollity than this rhythmic, spinning-wheel chorus of theirs. Up there, where the dense pine foliage made a sort of black coast to the dark blue ocean of the summer night, a whole nation of them was astir. They did not utter their peculiar note when on the wing; but every moment or two one of the concourse came to rest on a branch with a sudden snap, and forthwith set his spinning-jenny blithely going.