freest hitter was the best batsman. The bowling was all along the ground, hand and eye being everything, and judgement nothing; because the art originally was to bowl under the bat. The wicket was too low for rising balls; and the reason we hear sometimes of the blockhole was, not that the blockhole originally denoted guard, but because between these two-feet-asunder stumps there was cut a hole big enough to contain the ball, and (as now with the schoolboy's game of rounders) the hitter was made out in running a notch by the ball being popped into this hole (whence popping-crease) before the point of the bat could reach it.
Did we say Running a Notch? unde Notch? What wonder ere the days of useful knowledge, and Sir William Curtis's three R's,—or, reading, writing, and arithmetic,—that natural science should be evolved in a truly natural way; what wonder that notches on a stick, like the notches in the milk-woman's tally in Hogarth's picture, should supply the place of those complicated papers of vertical columns, which subject the bowling, the batting, and the fielding to a process severely and scrupulously just, of analytical observation, or differential calculus! Where now there sit on kitchen chairs, with ink-bottle tied to a stump the worse for wear, Messrs. Caldecourt and Bayley ('tis pity two such men should ever not be umpires), with an uncomfortable length of paper on their knees, and large tin telegraphic letters above their heads; and where now is Lillywhite's printing press, to hand down every hit as soon as made on twopenny cards to future generations; there, or in a similar position, old Frame, or young Small (young once: he died in 1834, aged eighty) might have placed a trusty yeoman to cut notches with his bread-and-bacon knife on an ashen stick. Oh! 'tis enough to make the Hambledon heroes sit upright in their graves with astonishment to think, that in the Gentlemen and Players' Match, in 1850, the cricketers of old Sparkes' Ground, at Edinburgh, could actually
