players given, playing the M.C.C. team; also with four professionals, in Rutlandshire. This M.C.C. team went on to play eleven "yeomen and artisans of Leicester," defeating them sorely, and in the same year the Nottingham men met with a similar fate at the hands of the Club.
From these matches and their results we are now able, I think, to infer two things—first, that cricket had been played for some long while, not as an imported invention, but as an aboriginal growth, in these northern counties before these teams visited them from the south, and secondly, that the southern counties had brought it to a much higher pitch of perfection, for they could never have gone down so ninepinlike before any eleven of the Marylebone Club. Likely enough the inspired doctrine, of the straight bat and the left elbow up, of that gifted baker of gingerbread, Harry Hall of Farnham, had not travelled so far as the home of these northern folk, and in that case they would have been at a parlous disadvantage to those who had been brought up by its lights. They had not perhaps been so long in the habit of coping with "length" balls, which made the adoption of the left elbow up almost a necessity of defence. When the bowling came all along the ground it did not matter. Also there was in the south that prince of bowlers, Harris, whose magical deliveries shot up so straightly from the ground that it was almost essential for playing them to get out to the pitch of the ball. And if they had not this bowling, what was to educate them,
