When we went away for our holidays it was ours to adventure with bat and ball on unaccustomed grounds: meadow cricket was tiresome, for the ball would hide itself in the long grass; and seaside cricket, though exhilarating, was too public a business to be taken really seriously. But cricket in the pinewoods was delightful—almost, I think, the best cricket of all. The soft needles made an admirable pitch, and we had all the trees for fielders. If you hit the ball against a tree full-pitch, you were out, and it was strange how those patient, silent fieldsmen, who never dropped catches, seemed to arrange themselves, as the game progressed, in the conventional places in the field. Point would be there, and mid-off, and some safe men in the slips. Overhead the birds would call in the trees, and there were queer echoes when you hit the ball hard, as though Pan were watching from some dim pavilion and crying his applause. Really I wonder how we dared, or perhaps it were fitter to wonder why we dare no longer. The oddest cricket I ever played was with a gardener, a reticent, impassive man, who came and played with me when sudden mumps had exiled me from my holiday-making comrades. He would bowl to me silently for hours, only parting his lips now and again to murmur the name of the stump which he proposed to hit with his next ball, and no efforts of mine could prevent his grim prophecies from being fulfilled. When I gave him his innings he would pat my widest and most wily balls back to me politely until he thought I was tired, and then he would let me bowl him. This unequal contest was not cricket as I knew it, but it fascinated me nevertheless. At night in my bed I would hit his bowling all over the world and upset his stumps with monotonous ease. By day I could only serve his humour. The devil was in the man. The bats with which we played were normal save in size, but the balls varied. In times of prosperity we had real leather cricket-balls, but the balls known as “compos” were more common. When new they had a noble appearance, but use made them rough and like dry earth in the hand, and then they were apt to sting the fingers of the unwary cricketer. The most perilous kind of ball of all was the size of a cricket-ball, but made of solid rubber, and deadly alike to batsman and fieldsman. For some reason or other the proper place in which to carry a cricket-ball was the trousers, or rather knickerbockers, pocket. The curious discomfort of this practice lingers in the mind. Soft balls are of no use in real cricket; but if you bore a hole in them and fill them with water they make very good bombs for practical anarchists.