“But, as to stirring excitement,” writes a friend, “what can surpass a hardly-contested match, when you have been manfully playing an uphill game, and gradually the figures on the telegraph keep telling a better and a better tale, till at last the scorers stand up and proclaim a tie, and you win the game by a single and rather a nervous wicket, or by five or ten runs! If in the field with a match of this sort, and trying hard to prevent these few runs being knocked off by the last wickets, I know of no excitement so intense for the time, or which lasts so long afterwards. The recollection of these critical moments will make the heart jump for years and years to come; and it is extraordinary to see the delight with which men call up these grand moments to memory; and to be sure how they will talk and chatter, their eyes glistening and pulses getting quicker, as if they were again finishing ‘that rattling good match.’ People talk of the excitement of a good run with the Quorn or Belvoir hunt. I have now and then tumbled in for these good things; and, as far as my own feelings go, I can safely say that a fine run is not to be compared to a good match; and the excitement of the keenest sportsman is nothing either in intensity or duration to that caused by a ‘near thing’ at cricket. The next good run takes the place of the other; whereas hard matches, like the snow-ball, gather as they go. This is my decided opinion; and that after watching and weighing the subject for some years. I have seen men tremble and turn pale at a near match, ‘_Quum spes arrectæ juvenum exultantiaque haurit_ _Corda pavor pulsans_’-- while, through the field, the deepest and most awful silence reigns, unbroken but by some nervous fieldsman humming a tune or snapping his fingers to hide his agitation.” “What a glorious sensation it is,” writes Miss Mitford, in ‘Our Village,’ “to be winning, winning, winning! Who would think that a little bit of leather and two pieces of wood had such a delightful and delighting power?” CHAP. III. THE HAMBLEDON CLUB AND THE OLD PLAYERS. What have become of the old scores and the earliest records of the game of cricket? Bentley’s Book of Matches gives the principal games from the year 1786; but where are the earlier records of matches made by Dehaney, Paulet, and Sir Horace Mann? All burnt!