Intellectual application will, to some extent, overcome physical difficulties.  By working at least five hours a day, and by reading the Cricket Field daily and nightly, I did learn to bowl a little, with a kind of twist.  This, while it lasted, in a bowlerless country, was a delightful accomplishment.  You got into much better sporting society than you deserved, and, in remote parts of the pastoral districts you were looked up to as one whose name had been in Bell’s Life; we still had Bell’s Life then.  It was no very difficult matter to bowl a rustic team for a score of runs or so, and all went merry as a wedding bell.  But, alas, when Drumthwacket played Tullochgorum, there was a young Cambridge man staying with the latter chieftain.  I began, as I usually did, by “yorking” Tullochgorum’s Piper and his chief Butler, and his head Stalker, and then Smith of King’s came in.  The ground, as usual, had four sides.  He hit me over the enclosure at each of the four sides, for I changed my end after being knocked for five fours in his first over.  After that, my prestige was gone.  The rustics, instead of crawling about their wickets, took to walking in and smacking me.  This would not have mattered, if any of the Drumthwacket team could have held a catch, and if the wicket-keeper had not let Smith off four times in one over.  My character was lost, and all was ended with me north of the Grampians, where the wickets are peculiarly suitable to my style of delivery.

As to batting, there is little that is pleasant to confess.  As soon as I got a distant view of a ball, I was ever tempted to whack wildly in its direction.  There was no use in waiting for it, the more I looked at it the less I liked it.  So I whacked, and, if you always do this, a ball will sometimes land on the driving part of the bat, and then it usually happened that my companion, striving for a five or a six, ran me out.  If he did not, I did not stay long.  The wicket-keeper was a person whose existence I always treated as une quantite negligeable, and sometimes the ball would bound off his pads into the stumps.  The fielders would occasionally hold a catch, anything may happen.  On the other hand there was this to be said for my style of batting, that the most experienced Cricketer could not tell where or in what direction I would hit any given ball.  If it was on the off, that was no reason why I should not bang it to square-leg, a stroke which has become fashionable since my time, but in those old days, you did not often see it in first-class Cricket.  It was rather regarded as “an agrarian outrage.”  Foreigners and ladies would find Cricket a more buoyant diversion if all the world, and especially Lewis hall and Shrewsbury, played on my principles.  Innings would not last so long.  Not so many matches would be drawn.  The fielders would not catch cold.