Page:Cricket (Lyttelton, 1898).djvu/14

10 and unapproachable. In making comparisons between this and that player, or sets of players; it is always understood that 'Grace is left out of the question—his standard, so far as batting is concerned, is to be looked at; not emulated. Those who never saw him in his prime, like our University players of to-day, can never know what cricket was when Grace was king; for half-an-hour of Grace's batting was to bowlers and field what Rudyard Kipling says of the Zulus and the British soldier:—

Half-an-hour of Grace's batting found the bowlers demoralised, the fields at their wits' end, the captain tearing his hair, and this not once or twice only, but week after week, year after year.

To return, however, to our batsman who on a hot day steps out to try his luck at the wicket, at the beginning of a match when the ball is red and the wickets very green.