While the cricket scribes used to regard Ranjitsinhji's good fortune in escaping a violent end while playing this speciality of his as a supernatural gift, practical cricketers consider the stroke bad form. "That leg stroke of yours," said an old player to him in the pavilion at Lord's, "is all very well now and then, but it's not cricket; it's far too risky. If you miss the ball, you're bound to be out leg before." "Quite so," replied Ranji; "but one would be out pretty frequently, clean bowled, if one missed the ball--every time a straight ball came, in fact." Ranjitsinhji's batting has been variously described as satanic, electric, and elusive. "Serpentine" would be far more accurate. Anyone in the least familiar with the famous Indian's style will at once see the point of the epithet. The line of beauty, we all know, is a curve; and the real secret of the attractiveness of Ranji's batting (from the spectators' point of view) is that every position he assumes seems to be laid out in a curve. In the illustration on page 215 "Rip" has but very slightly exaggerated the effect of the sinuous curves into which Ranji's body resolves itself before he makes a stroke. That he can unbend faster than any other cricketer past or present is an incontestable fact. The yarn of how in a match at Cambridge he once brought off a catch with such amazing rapidity that the batsman, under the impression that the ball had travelled near the boundary, continued running till Ranji extracted the ball from his pocket, is most likely apocryphal; but to anyone who has seen him fielding slip the feat ascribed to him won't seem impossible. [Illustration: RANJI BATTING--A STUDY IN GRACEFUL POSE.] By the way, it's an odd thing that while Ranjitsinhji's batting owes its attractiveness to the "curves" of the batsman, an equally graceful player--to wit, the lengthy William Gunn--is built on uncompromisingly straight lines. Somebody said that if Gunn were to model his style on Ranji's the result would be a sea-serpent--six and a half feet of curves.