Page:Jubilee Book of Cricket (Second edition, 1897).djvu/371

Rh members can write, read, smoke, refresh, and discuss the topics of the day. The "Hawks" was the first of a number of clubs, run upon more or less similar lines, such as the "Pilgrims,"

"Jackdaws," "Chaffinches," &c., partly social and partly cricketical. To all or any of these, except to the Quidnuncs, a man can be elected in his first year, so that if he is not engaged in University matches, but is, for all that, a good and useful cricketer, he will have plenty of opportunities of keeping his hand and eye in.

This sketch, necessarily brief, will give some idea of a cricketer's life at Cambridge and its possibilities. Every one has his chance of distinguishing himself in his own particular sphere: if that sphere be the highest, if he "attains Sparta and adorns her," he is marked for life in the cricketing world as a batsman or bowler who has won his spurs in the most exciting yet most. "gentle and joyous passage of arms" known to the cricketer. If a lucky fate allows him the leisure, there are no heights to which he may not soar, provided that his right hand does not forget its cunning, and that custom does not stale his infinite variety.

No record of Cambridge cricket would be complete in the eyes of a Cambridge man without a more than passing allusion to the late Rev. A. R. Ward. Himself an old Light-blue and captain of the eleven—though illness prevented him from appearing at Lord's in that capacity—he took a keen and deep interest in Cambridge cricket and its welfare which none can appreciate who did not know him personally. He was president of the C.U.C.C. for many years, and the one great desire of his life was to see the club the possessor of its own ground and of a proper and adequate pavilion. The latter wish, thanks to his own personal and untiring exertions,—he wrote 1500 letters, as he told the writer, with his own hand,—was fulfilled in 1876, the club having then secured a long lease of the ground which is now its own, though he was not spared to see his other wish fulfilled. The charming paviHon of the club, however, is a standing memorial of his exertions, with its oak panels, inscribed with the names of the various elevens in the order in which they batted in the first innings against Oxford. Of these he was most careful, and it was to prevent any injury to the precious lists that he insisted on a law forbidding the introduction of walking-sticks into the pavilion. He was immensely proud of his position as president of the C.U.C.C, and the writer well remembers a little incident, when, seeing the Master of Marlborough College, to whom he was personally unknown, at the Rugby v. Marlborough match, he