him, he very rarely could prevent a mistake, from the height and rapidity with which the ball cut up from the ground."—This account agrees with the well-known description of Nyren. "Harris's mode of delivering the ball was very singular. He would bring it from under his arm by a twist, and nearly as high as his arm-pit, and with this action push it, as it were, from him. How it was that the balls acquired the velocity they did by this mode of delivery, I never could comprehend. His balls were very little beholden to the ground; it was but a touch and up again; and woe be to the man who did not get in to block them, for they had such a peculiar curl they would grind his fingers against the bat."
And Nyren agrees with my informants in ascribing great improvement in batting, and he specifies, "particularly in stopping" (for the act of defence, we said, was not essential to the batsman in the ideas of one of the old players), to the bowling of David Harris, and bears testimony to an assertion, that forward play, that is meeting at the pitch balls considerably short of a half volley, was little known to the oldest players, and was called into requisition chiefly by the bowling of David Harris. Obviously, with the primitive fashion of ground bowling, called sneakers, forward play could have no place, and even well-pitched balls, like those of Peter Stevens, alias
