The best bowling is sometimes hit; but I have not heard of any man who found it much easier to score off Clarke than off other good bowlers. To play Clarke “on any foregone conclusion” is fatal. Every ball must be judged by its respective merits and played accordingly. Again, as to cutting, or in any way crossing, these dropping or curvilinear balls. As a slow ball rises twice as much in a given space as a fast ball, of course the chances are greater that the bat will not cover the ball at the point at which, by anticipation, you cut. If you cut at a fast ball, the height of its rise is nearly uniform, and its course a straight line: so, most men like very fast bowling, because, if the hand is quick enough, the judgment is not easily deceived, for the ball moves nearly in straight lines. But, in cutting or in crossing a slow ball, the height of the rise varies enough to produce a mistake while the bat is descending on the ball. Once more, in playing at a ball after its rise, a safe and forcible hit can only be made in two ways. You must either meet the ball with full and straight bat, or cut horizontally across it. Now, as slow balls generally rise too high for a hard hit with perpendicular bat, you are reduced generally to the difficulties of cutting or back play. Add to all this, that the bias from the hand and from the inequalities of the ground is much greater, and also that a catch, resulting from a feeble hit and the ball spinning off the edge of the bat, remains commonly so long in the air that every fieldsman can cover double his usual quantity of ground, and then we shall cease to wonder that the best players cannot score fast off slow bowling. CHAP. IX. BOWLING.--AN HOUR WITH “OLD CLARKE.” In cricket wisdom Clarke is truly “Old:” what he has learnt from anybody, he learnt from Lambert. But he is a man who thinks for himself, and knows men and manners, and has many wily devices, “_splendidè mendax_.” “I beg your pardon, sir,” he one day said to a gentleman taking guard, “but ain’t you Harrow?”--“Then we shan’t want a man down there,” he said, addressing a fieldsman; “stand for the ‘Harrow drive,’ between point and middle wicket.” The time to see Clarke is on the morning of a match. While others are practising, he walks round with his hands under the flaps of his coat, reconnoitring his adversaries’ wicket. “Before you bowl to a man, it is worth something to know what is running in his head. That gentleman,” he will say, “is too fast on his feet, so, as good as ready money to me: if he doesn’t hit he can’t score; if he does I shall have him directly.”