Lionel did pretty well, but it was bad cricket weather, for there was a snow-laden wind which numbed the fingers. It was, however, a start: a new cricket season had begun. I have since seen the Gentlemen _v._ Players of 1908, and I am disappointed. It was not so much the inferior cricket of the Gentlemen that troubled me: I would as soon see the Players win; it was the spirit of the Gentlemen that distressed me, or rather the want of it. Gentlemen they may be in name and even station, but they no longer play like gentlemen; they play like overworked artisans. Anxiety and boredom have crept into cricket. The Gentlemen as I remember them took the field joyously and cut a dash. It was their pride to let no ball pass them. The Gentlemen to-day are listless and without jokes--almost without personality. They have no Grace and, even more conspicuously perhaps, no "Monkey." It comes, I fancy, very largely from playing too much. What was once a game is now a calling; and a calling which involves of necessity so much disappointment and so much idleness (while waiting first for one's own innings and then for the other innings of one's side to finish, to say nothing of rain,) must lead to a certain amount of cynicism and saturnine fatalism. I don't think that cricket as a whole has improved in these thirty years. Batting, perhaps, is nearer perfection; but it is far less interesting. The first-class game seems to know three strokes only--the late cut, the off drive, and the leg glance: all good, and it is astonishing how many batsmen can make them; but I would like to see more hitting, in the old style, where fieldsmen are not. In my time the fieldsmen did not exert such a magnetic influence over the ball as they now do, attracting it for the most part straight to their hands. Bowling, I think, is not so good as it was. Too much dependence has been placed on the fast bumping men and five slips, and the result is a loss in the more delicate _finesse_ that was so attractive when I was young--the _finesse_ of Shaw and Southerton, and Jim Lillywhite, and later, as I have been told, of Lohmann and Peel and Briggs. But the pendulum is always swinging, and personality knows no law and may appear at any moment; so I do not despair. And it will always be the best of games. In the evening after Lionel's match I found Queen Anne's Gate in despair. The annual visit of old Mrs. Wynne--Grandmamma, as she is called, for Margaret's mother (my stepmother) long since gave up all rivalry in the title--the annual visit of Mrs. Wynne has been fixed for next month.