race for the block-hole between wicket-keeper and batsman.
And the bowling? The bowling of course was bowling, all along the ground, as in the famous old game of bowls. Very likely it was in some respects the best sort of bowling for the business. With a wicket only a foot high, anything between the longest of long-hops or the yorkiest of yorkers would have jumped over it. They found out this disadvantage later, when they began to bowl "length" balls, which, after all is said, must have been far the more puzzling for the batsman. And besides the chance of going over the wicket, there was also the excellent opportunity of going through the wicket, between two stumps set as far apart as 2 feet. Probably this occurred so often that it did not seem particularly hard luck. The batsman, more probably, deemed himself very hardly used if he did not get two or three extra lives of this grace.
And after all, though no records that I can find have come down to us from those times, it is safe to infer that the batsmen did not make an overwhelming number of runs. Had it been so we should almost certainly have heard of it by oral tradition, and Aylward's great score of 167 at the end of the century would not have stood out as such a unique effort. Nor have we far to seek for the reason that the scores were not prodigious. Though the wicket was low, it was very broad, and a ball running over the surface of bumpy ground, as we may suppose those wickets to have been, would very often have
