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no-balling him all day until it was too dark to see his high hand, for Willsher would not bowl with lower delivery, What he did, instead, was to throw the ball down and leave the ground, followed by all his eight professional brethren taking part in the match. It was near time for stump-drawing for the day; and drawn the stumps now were, a little before time, and the game was resumed next morning with an umpire less uncompromising, readier to 'turn the blind eye' to the high hand than Lillywhite, and apparently Willsher continued his high-handed action to the end of the piece.

All the umpires except Lilly white appear to have been in a conspiracy to take this Nelson-like view, or no-view, of the too elevated delivery; so that the rule became reduced to a farce, and the M.C.C. were forced to make a change in that said Rule X, which it would have shown more 'sweet reasonableness' on their part to have changed voluntarily and without constraint a year or two earlier. Box, in 'The Theory and Practice of Cricket,' published in 1868, treats of the cricket that we know. The bowler may give us what we have heard of lately as the 'Gregory Mixture'-mercifully a little less drastic than we found it a year or two ago-banged down upon us from the best height his hand can reach.

Of all the later books, so far too many to name, we shall not easily find a better, both for instruction and general interest, than that Badminton book on Cricket, edited by Mr R. H. Lyttelton, and first published in 1888. It has been a little crowded out by the works of more modern experts, but even now it reads fresh and good. And how sound a judge of cricket Mr Lyttelton is even to-day I may intimate by a remark of his to me about this year's test matches before the first of them was played: If the weather's fine, not one of them will be finished-they will all be drawn-except the last, and that will depend on who wins the toss because the wicket is sure to wear on the fourth or fifth day.'

Broadly, it is what did happen, though it was not always fine weather that brought about the draws. At Nottingham only one, Jupiter Pluvius by name, got an innings at all, and he stayed hard at it the whole of the three days, very selfishly. He took a hand in some of the other matches too; and as for any crumbling of the

wicket, to determine the last and deciding test, it simply did not happen: there was no crumbling. The rain god just did enough to allow the roller to smooth all out. It looks very much-though we should avoid 'frantic boast'—as if the better side won; and that is a conclusion which none of the drawn matches, so far as they went, controverted. The trickiest state of the wicket was when those heroes, Hobbs and Sutcliffe, were opening the way for our victory at the beginning of England's second innings. And there, at that moment, Mr Noble assured us in the Evening Standard,' Hobbs was putting up a great 'bluff,' declining to score off Richardson, ' nursing' him so that Collins kept him on, instead of changing him for Macartney, who would have been far more dangerous on that wicket.

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Thus, Mr Noble: and he may be right. Or, again, he may be wrong; but is there not a danger that this 'thinking cricket' may be overdone? Much of this study of psychology in cricket comes from down under.' That admirable captain, Mr Warwick Armstrong, has written an admirable book in The Art of Cricket,' and so, too, Mr Noble in The Game's the Thing.' How they do think! And as a result we have to admit a very scientific and effective placing of the field and bowling of the ball to tempt the incoming batsman to the commission of his most besetting sin. The bowler is even given the counsel to study the expression of the batsman as he comes to the wicket, in order to prescribe for him the medicine likely to be most fatal to the poor patient whose weakness is thus diagnosed. We shall soon have the batsman himself studying to put on a 'poker face,' to mask his true sentiments from the bowler! It would be interesting to hear, from one who must know even better than Mr Noble, that is to say, from Hobbs himself, whether that glorious batsman really did practise all the guile ascribed to him. We doubt it.

It is impossible to give Hobbs glory beyond his deserts. One of the very latest, and one of the most excellent, of cricket books is 'The Perfect Batsman'-of course J. B. Hobbs-by A. C. Maclaren. It names him well. We won back the ashes; we won them worthily; but if we look up the scores we shall be surprised to see for how much in the making of them our two head men,

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it Hobbs and Sutcliffe, counted. Cut their scores out, and it is not a very large remainder. But not so with Australia. The faculties of the two teams are well symbolised by their totems-the British with the lion, all the fangs and fierceness in his head; Australia with its kangaroo, whose terror is his tail.' Excellent fellows, excellent sportsmen, as ever, these Australians have proved themselves, whether in victory or in defeat. But had some of them not better begin to ask themselves whether there is not a pregnant truth in that comment of 'W. G.,' and his fear lest, if he did too much thinking, Charles might bowl him out with a long hop?

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And how about future test matches? For, beyond question, the present arrangements here need some amendment. But in what detail? Five tests, all played to the bitter end, would make too big a hole in our native, county cricket. Three fought to a finish is an alternative which seems reasonable. But the more ultimate question remains: What, if anything, are we to do about the rules of the game, to help the bowler against the batter? If we succeed in finding the answer to that, may it not solve the secondary question too? If legs are not allowed for the defence of wickets will not wickets go down sufficiently fast to make three days of full play-and it would not hurt our cricketers to 'add a minute to the day'-adequate for settling most cricket battles?

I know that many of the strokes in this long pen innings of mine will be censured, but on one point I believe all will agree, that it is time that it came to an end. I am just about to give myself' Out'; yet there is so very much more still crying to be said that I can scarcely bring myself to it. For example, I have not so much as named Mr Neville Cardus, surely the best and brightest of our cricket reporters; though as a team the work of these reporters is now very good. His books, too, A Cricketer's Book,' and 'Days in the Sun,' have almost the Nyren touch of enthusiastic sympathy for great men, mostly beneath the turf, but with a minority happily yet leather-hunting over it. He must not be missed. But there are so many! Who is there, we begin to ask, from the great Hobbs downwards-Hobbs as good a fellow, generous, modest, kindly, cheerful, and Vol. 247.-No. 490.

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unspoilt, on the field as off it-who has not given us his Reminiscences'? To Mr Parker my thanks are due for introduction to the Reminiscences of Mr Sammy' Woods, who writes in the very spirit of his bowling, and that was spirited enough for most people.

The figure that stands out, of course, for all to survey. is that of the great Gloucestershire man with the big black beard. If cricket is about a hundred years old, that man dominated very nearly half its span. That is wonderful. Most of the anecdotes about him are only to be culled now 'beneath the spreading chestnut tree,' but I believe I have one to tell that has not before been put in print. It is a tale he himself liked to tell.

In later life he lived in a house at Norwood. One day his parlourmaid had her afternoon 'off,' and on her return her master hoped she had had a pleasant afternoon.'

'Very pleasant, thank you, sir.'
'What did you do?

'We went to Madame Tussaud's.'
'Oh, then you saw me there.'
'No, sir-no, we didn't.'

'What-not me with my bat, and Arthur Shrews

bury?'

'No, sir.'

That was Act I. Act II, and the dénoûment, consisted in the girl's going to Mrs Grace, and innocently saying, 'I'm afraid, ma'am, master was rather vexed that we didn't happen to see him at Madame Tussaud's: the truth is it was sixpence extra to go into the Chamber of Horrors, and we didn't care to pay that.'

HORACE G. HUTCHINSON.

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Art. 3.-THE PROBLEM OF MOTOR TRAFFIC.

AT the birth of new industries or crafts, such as bicycling, motoring, or flying, a three-party struggle begins, and thereafter impedes, yet guides, their growth. These parties are, in the order of their importance: first, the public, which holds the purse and will one day call the tune; second, the maker and trader, whose elan is tempered by the will to tap that purse; third, the innovator, sure that his views are instinct with destiny, but blind to the long vista of delays required for harmonising his proposals to a nation's life. The technician in him often forgets that the driving-force of sentiment is, at least, as strong as that of reason or economics.

The battle for the motor-car at one time was severe. Fears were expressed with emphasis, and a barrage of laws was made. There was bad shooting, and some ricochets painful to the shooter. Thus, about sixty years ago the four-mile speed limit and the turnpikes stunned British motoring pioneers; and also wounded the agricultural, and kept unconscious the automobile, industries for half a century. Again, the 12-mile-an-hour limit of 1896 held us back. That was the day when the imported car was the real thing. The 20 m.p.h. limit of 1903 would still keep us behind the foreign world and choke a most remunerative manufacture and an economic good, were not the law in that respect so fully ignored that not even a Prime Minister would buy a car that was not guaranteed to exceed the limit.

It is bad for the State that the law should not be sanctioned by the moral conscience; and bad as well that the line of progress should be against the law: or, to put it more directly, it discredits the law to be against the line of progress. It is in technical matters that this kind of faulty law seems to be most easily enacted. Some say this is so because science has ever been the weak point of parliaments; others, because parliamentarians are chosen more for their brass trumpets than their bright brains. But the reason goes deeper. The law should be chary of dealing with technical rules expressed in numerical measures. Thus, to take an example apart from motoring. London was prevented from using steel factory chimneys for years by a requirement

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