batting to the advance of bowling, notably to the wonderful bowling of Harris, which was of that portentous character to which the name of epochmaking is not misapphed, and Nyren is of the same opinion with Beldham, whom he considers to have been the first to play Harris's bowling with success by getting out to it at the pitch.
We have seen, in another part of the book, that, setting aside the stool-ball, and the other legendary sports of the ancients, which were "not cricket," the first game worthy of the name of cricket that appears in the dim twilight of history is the game they played at the beginning of the eighteenth century—say for simplicity's sake in 1700. In 1700 and for some time later the wicket that men bowled at was formed, as we have seen, of two stumps, each 1 foot high, 2 feet apart, and with a cross-stump by way of a bail laid from one to the other. Between the two stumps, and below the cross one, was a hole scraped in the ground—the primitive block-hole. There was no popping-crease: the batsman grounded his bat by thrusting the end of the bat into the block-hole. Then he was "in his ground." But if the wicket-keeper, or any fieldsman, could put the ball into the hole before the batsman had his bat grounded in it, the batsman was out. Observe, it was not a matter of knocking off the cross-stump with the ball, but of getting the ball into the hole before the batsman grounded his bat in it. It takes no very vivid imagination to picture the bruised and bloody fingers that must have resulted from the violent contact of the bat when there was a
