once you move your pivot foot, you lose that self-command essential for leg-hits. So, practise, In your garden or your room, the stride and swing of the bat, till you have learnt to preserve your balance.
One of the best leg-hitters is Dakin: and his rule is: keep your right foot firm on your ground; advance the left straight to the pitch, and as far as you can reach, and hit as straight at the pitch as you can, just as if you were hitting to longfield: as the lines of bat and ball form an angle, the ball will fly away square of itself.
My belief is, the Wykehamists introduced the art of hitting leg-balls at the pitch. When, in 1833, at Oxford, Messrs. F. B. Wright and Payne scored above sixty each off Lillywhite and Broadbridge, it was remarked by the players, they had never seen their leg-hit before. Clarke says he showed how to make forward leg-hits at Nottingham. For, the Nottingham men used to hit after leg-balls, and miss them, till he found the way of intercepting them at the rise, and hitting square.
And this will be a fair occasion for qualifying certain remarks which would appear to form what is aptly called a "toe-in-the-hole" player.
When I spoke so strongly about using the right foot as a pivot, and the left as a balance foot, insisting, also, on not moving the right foot, I addressed myself not to proficients, but to
