busy. Yet when the eventful afternoon arrives, there are generally some fourteen or fifteen Benedicts ready to do battle for the honour of their wives and families, against a meagre dozen or so of the less fortunate Bachelors. Public enthusiasm, at all times keen in village cricket, reaches its high-water mark on this great day, and the ladies especially assemble in large numbers to do honour to the brave. Sympathy is invariably and entirely with the married men—I suppose because part of the audience are the wives of the team now stripping for the fray, and the other part hope that by next summer at latest they will be in the same proud position. On paper there can be no question that the Bachelors have the strongest side, but against their youth, their practice, and their skill we place our experience and our considerable numerical advantage, so there is not much in it. Then again, they look rather contemptuously at our weatherbeaten ranks; say we have no bowling, can't run (two of us are over seventy, certainly!), and are altogether as sorry a collection of prehistoric peeps as ever took the field. Nous verrons! The Bachelors win the toss and start batting. An old man of sixty-seven, who has recently contracted a second matrimonial alliance to make sure of his place in the team, asks to keep wicket, and after buckling on a pair of lovely old faded yellow pads, he goes to say "Good-bye" to his new "missus," and get her to pull his waistcoat down and stuff it inside the back of his trousers (this I saw myself). Then I arrange the rest of my veterans in a sort of inner and outer circle round the
