Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/82



another chapter I have traced in some degree the development of the game as regards play. I will now try and show how the game has developed from what I may call the social side. Cricket is now a very serious affair; the struggle for supremacy among counties has reached a pitch of gravity that seems remarkable, considering that many counties are made up of players gathered in from all parts of England. Why an Oval crowd should be so desperately keen to see Surrey win a county match when Nottingham, Yorkshire, Kent, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Middlesex, have at different times been drawn upon to make up the Surrey eleven seems incomprehensible, but it is a fact. Human nature, as Squeers said, is "a rum