The Players' strongest men were Harry Jupp, Harry Charlwood, Shaw, and Morley. Daft also was playing, but he made only 21. Charlwood, the Sussex man, came out top scorer with 85, not a few of them made by a stroke which seems to have utterly died away since then--a glance under the left leg. He was very good at it, the little, active, mutton-chop-whiskered fellow. My very first Gentlemen _v._ Players match was in 1868. It was at Lord's, and W.G. was playing then too. He only made 134 not out, but it sufficed. People, I understand, go to see individual cricketers now, but there can never since--not even in Ranjitsinhji's best days (which I missed)--have been such excitement and enthusiasm among the watchers of the cricket skies as in the late sixties and early seventies in W.G.'s first decade. The Gentlemen's innings at the Lord's match in 1868 was a sufficient indication of the place in which this stripling of nineteen, a year older than I was, stood even then--for his "hand" (as a few old-fashioned persons still called a score) was 134 not out, and the whole side made only 201. It was W.G., too, who took the Players' wickets--6 in the first innings for 50 runs and 4 in the second for 31. He is not bowling much now, and he has come to field in the way that provokes a good-natured cheer from the crowd after every stopped ball; but the shining fact remains that here he is still, in the cricket field, an active man. As I watched him I had to rub my eyes; for it seemed as if all my years of exile, all my absurd conscientious attention to duty in that far-off alien land, had been a dream. What has happened in the interval? Everything has happened. The Franco-Prussian war; the death of Dickens; the re-establishment of the French Republic; the bombardment of Alexandria; the rise of the Salvation Army; the Boer war; Stevenson, Whistler and Kipling; the Daily Mail; the assassination of Kings and Queens and Presidents; the destruction of San Francisco. And all the while W.G. has been playing cricket. After 1868 I saw every Gentlemen _v._ Players match but two until I went to Buenos Ayres at the beginning of 1875--in which time the Players won only once. I saw I.D. Walker make his 165 at the Oval in 1868. At Lord's in the following year I saw W.G.'s hit for 7 off Wootton, no longer possible there except with an overthrow, and I.D.'s 71; and I remember what a hard nut to crack Jupp was in the second innings. Poor Yardley, who afterwards wrote burlesques, came into the match that year. But the 1870 match at the Oval was the great one, for that was when G.F. first played, and though he got spectacles, he took altogether 8 wickets for 46 runs, and W.G. made his 215 in the second innings. As it happened, it was too many, for it meant a draw; but what a feat it was!