CONFESSIONS OF A DUFFER.

V.—­The Duffer at Cricket.

To hear my remarks on the Cricket, in the Pavilion, you might think that I had been a great player entirely, in my day.  “Who is that fine old English sportsman,” you might ask, “who seems to have been so intimate with MYNN, and Fuller Pilch, and Carpenter, and Hayward and Tarrant and Jackson and C.D.  MARSHAM?  No doubt we see in him the remains of a sterling Cricketer of the old school.”  And then when I lay down the law on the iniquity of boundary hits, “always ran them out in my time,” and on the tame stupidity of letting balls to the off go unpunished, and the wickedness of dispensing with a long stop, you would be more and more pursuaded that I had at least, played for my county.  Well, I have played for my county, but as the county I played for was Berwickshire, there is perhaps nothing to be so very proud of in that distinction.  But this I will say for the Cricketing Duffer; he is your true enthusiast.  When I go to Lord’s on a summer day, which of my contemporaries do I meet there?  Not the men who played for the University, not the KENNYS and Mitchells and Butlers, but the surviving members of College Second Elevens in the old days of Cowley Marsh, when every man brought his own bottle of Oxford wine for luncheon.  These are the veterans who contribute most to the crowd of lookers-on.  They never were of any use as players, but their hearts were in the game, and from the game they will never be divorced.  It is an ill thing for an outsider to drop a remark about Cricket among us, at about eleven o’clock in a country house smoking-room.  After that the time flies in a paradise of reminiscences, till about 4 A.M. or some such “wee, short hour ayont the Twal’,” if one may quote Burns without being insulted by all the numerous and capable wits of Glasgow.  Why is it that the Duffer keeps up his interest in Cricket, while the good players cease to care much about it?  Perhaps their interest was selfish; his is purely ideal, and consequently immortal.  To him Cricket was ever an unembodied joy of which he could make nothing palpable; nothing subject to the cold law of averages.  Mine was 0.3.

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My own introduction to Cricket, as to Golf, was peculiarly poignant.  I and my brother, aged more or less about six or seven, were invited to play by the local Club, and we each received exactly one very slow and considerate lob.  But his lob took him on the eye, and mine, kicking on a bad wicket, had me on the knee-pan.  The subsequent proceedings did not interest us very much, but there is nothing like entering children early at a manly pastime.