Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/89

66 time be playing for another county. Lancashire, I believe, always did give a more genuine qualification. There are in that county many large towns and many cricket clubs: these clubs want professional cricketers to bowl to their members and to play League matches on Saturday afternoons; accordingly a professional cricketer is engaged by all these clubs, who thus acquires a more or less bonâ-fide qualification on the ground of residence. It is true that he probably goes to his own home in the winter, but for the four or five months of the spring and summer he resides in the town where his club ground is situated, and though this is not complete, it is some sort of residential qualification.

There are other sorts of counties where another state of things exists; in such counties as Glamorganshire and Norfolk, Devon and Dorset, amateurs are to be found, who are glad and willing to play perhaps five, six, or seven matches in the year, generally of two days only, against another county of the same calibre. Such matches in old days used to be played between Worcestershire and Herefordshire, and now Bucks plays Herts and Devon plays Dorset.