Then appears our vicar in semi-canonicals, worn “to keep up his position,” or some such folly, nervous about the adjustment of his hat and his eyeglasses.  He approaches the pitch, smiling the while to show his purely genial import and to anticipate and explain any amateurish touches.  He reaches the wicket and poses himself, as the convenient book he has studied directs.  “You’ll be caught, Muster Shackleforth, if you keep your shoulder up like that,” says the umpire.  “Ya-a-ps! that’s worse!”—­forgetting himself in his zeal for attitude.  And then a voice cries “Play!”

The vicar swipes wildly, cuts the ball for two, and returns to his wicket breathless but triumphant.  Next comes a bye, and then over.  The misguided cleric, ever pursuing a theory of foolish condescension to his betters at the game, and to show there is no offence at the “Yaaps,” takes the opportunity, although panting, of asking my ancient if his chicks—­late threatened with staggers—­are doing well.  What would he think if my cricketer retaliated by asking, in the pause before the sermon, how the vicarage pony took his last bolus?  The two men do not understand one another.  My cricketer waves the hens aside, and revenges himself, touching his hat at intervals, by some offensively obvious remarks—­as to a mere beginner—­about playing with a straight bat.  And the field sniggers none too furtively.  I sympathise with his malice.  Cricket is an altogether too sacred thing to him to be tampered with on merely religious grounds.  However, our vicar gets himself caught at the first opportunity, and so being removed from my veteran’s immediate environment, to their common satisfaction, the due ritual of the great game is resumed.

My ancient cricketer abounds in reminiscence of the glorious days that have gone for ever.  He can still recall the last echoes of the “throwing” controversy that agitated Nyren, when over-arm bowling began, and though he never played himself in a beaver hat, he can, he says, recollect seeing matches so played.  In those days everyone wore tall hats—­the policeman, the milkman, workmen of all sorts.  Some people I fancy must have bathed in them and gone to bed wearing them.  He recalls the Titans of that and the previous age, and particularly delights in the legend of Noah Mann, who held it a light thing to walk twenty miles from Northchapel to Hambledon to practise every Tuesday afternoon, and wander back after dark.  He himself as a stripling would run a matter of four miles, after a day’s work in the garden where he was employed, to attend an hour’s practice over the downs before the twilight made the balls invisible.  And afterwards came Teutonic revelry or wanderings under the summer starlight, as the mood might take him.  For there was a vein of silent poetry in the youth of this man.