Page:Cricket (Lyttelton, 1898).djvu/97

rule and not the exception; and yet for the next two years we may have bad weather, and a new rule that might have been of benefit to the game this year, will be found useless or harmful next year. The subject is not one on which I have at all made up my mind, but the question comes repeatedly to me as to whether human ingenuity cannot devise some means whereby the hard wickets may be made by some sort of treatment, not dangerous, but more difficult. Why should pitches be made so deadly smooth? Any duffer gets runs now. Let a little more grass be left on the wicket, as there used to be when the scythe and not the mowing machine was used. A possibly crude suggestion this, but we had better fun in the days when the bowlers had more to help them. The subject, however, must here be dismissed for the present.