Page:The Hambledon Men (1907).djvu/191

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NOAH'S JOKE
139

very little stumping to do, and Minshull and Colshorn, all mentioned in Nyren. These men played puddling about their crease and had no freedom. I like to see a player upright and well forward, to face the ball like a man. The Duke of Dorset made a match at Dartford Brent between "the Old Players and the New".—You laugh, sir,' said this tottering silver-haired old man, 'but we all were New once;—well, I played with the Walkers, John Wells, and the rest of our men, and beat the Old ones very easily.'

Old John Small died, the last, if not the first of the Hambledonians, in 1826. Isaac Walton, the father of Anglers, lived to the age of ninety-three. This father of Cricketers was in his ninetieth year. John Small played in all the great matches till he was turned of seventy. A fine skater and a good musician. But, how the Duke of Dorset took great interest in John Small, and how his Grace gave him a fiddle, and how John, like a modern Orpheus, beguiled a wild bull of its fury in the middle of a paddock, is it not written in the book of the chronicles of the playmates of Old Nyren?—In a match of Hambledon against All England, Small kept up his wicket for three days, and was not out after all. A pity his score is unknown. We should like to compare it with Mr. Ward's.

'Tom Walker was the most tedious fellow to bowl to, and the slowest runner between wickets I ever saw. Harry was the hitter,—Harry's half-hour was as good as Tom's afternoon. I have seen Noah Mann, who was as fast as Tom was slow, in running a four, overtake him, pat him on the back, and say, "Good name for you is Walker, for you never was a runner." It used to be said that David Harris had once bowled him 170 balls for one run! David was a potter by trade, and in a kind of skittle-alley made between hurdles, he used to practise bowling four different balls from one end, and then picking them up he would bowl them back again. His bowling cost him a great deal of practice; but it proved well worth his while, for no man ever bowled like him,