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THE ACTIVE RUNNER.
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like mad, forgetting that both he and his partner (a heavier man perhaps) want a little wind left for the next ball.—O Ignavum pecus! so-called "steady" players. Steady, indeed! You stand like posts, without the least intuition of a run. The true cricketer runs while another is thinking of it; indeed, he does not think—he sees and feels it is a run. He descries when the fieldsman has a long reach with his left hand, or when he must overbalance and right himself, or turn before he can throw. He watches hopefully the end of a long throw, or a ball backed carelessly up,—Bear witness, bowlers, to the virtue of a single run made sharply and vexatiously. Just as your plot is ripe, the batsmen change, and an ordinary length supersedes the very ball that would have beguiled your man. Is it nothing to break in upon the complete Over to the same man? And, how few the bowlers who repeat the length from which a run is made! To repeat, passionless as the catapult, a likely length, hit or not hit, here it is the professional beats the amateur.—"These indirect influences of making each possible run," says Mr. E. T. King, "are too little considered. Once I saw, to my full conviction, the whole fortune of a game changed by simply effecting two single runs; one, while a man was threatening to throw, instead of throwing, in the ball; the other, while a ball was dribbling in from about