“Dear simple soul,” she said. “That’s just old George. _So_ ingenuous you know. Look at him, rolling up his sleeves and setting out the field. If this ground’s big enough to hold old George, he’s altered lately. Now watch, he’s beginning his run. Oh, hang it, I’ve left my kodak on the billiard table. What lovely sights you _do_ see when you haven’t got your kodak! Old George really ought to keep his bowling in a show, you know. It’s so _sudden_, so _unexpected_! It reminds me of those ‘Odes in Contribution to the Jolly Song, of the Jolly Something,’ that the Guv’nor’s got. I say, do look at him. There he goes--the dear old boy!--a hop, a stride, another hop, another stride, a double jump, and then he chucks up the innocentest cuckoo that you ever saw.” His first ball came into collision with a tankard of beer in the refreshment booth; but it would be kinder to draw the veil of reticence around the gallant Captain’s trundling. It was now something after five, the Little Clumpton score was 440 for four wickets, and the bowling of proud Hickory was dead, and longing for a quiet funeral. To see this haughty eleven, footsore, weary, limp, and very cross, not troubling to save the boundary, failing to back up, keeping the bowler waiting while they crossed over, was a sermon in itself on the instability of human triumphs and the cussedness of cricket. Five members of their side had totalled 727 between them the previous day, but now those five in common with their less gifted colleagues, were compelled to expiate their severities in as vigorous a leather-hunting as ever a team submitted to. And, to aggravate their pains, they knew quite well that on this occasion, Little Clumpton’s so-called bowling was an object of derision. The sight of these world-famed batsmen limping round the boundary, and repeatedly extracting the ball from a sharp-tongued and not too sympathetic multitude, was perilously like one of the ironies of life strained to the point of pathos. But as I have no desire to wallow in the pathetic, leaving that to my intellectual betters, let me touch as lightly as I can on the tragedy of Hickory. Let it suffice that the Pessimist and the General Nuisance remained at the wickets cutting, driving, leg hitting, and showing off their wrist work till stumps and the match were drawn. As a new record had been set up in Little Clumpton _v._ Hickory, I think it justifiable to reproduce the full score as it appeared in the _Sportsman_ the following morning. The bowling analysis is withheld, however, out of compassion for Miss Grace, who took the matter so very much to heart, that a young person less sound in her constitution, and less right thinking in her mental habitudes, might perhaps have kept her bed in consequence for several days. As I have carefully copied this score out of my commonplace book, its correctness is guaranteed. LITTLE CLUMPTON _v._ HICKORY. _1st Inns. of Little Clumpton._