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Rh has sway enough to leave the vanquished an if and a but. A long innings bespeaks good play; but "out the first ball" is no disgrace. A game, to be really a game, really playful, should admit of chance as well as skill. It is the bane of chess that its character is too severe—to lose its games is to lose your character; and most painful of all, to be outwitted in a fair and undeniable contest of long-headedness, tact, manœuvring, and common sense—qualities in which no man likes to come off second best. Hence the restless nights and unforgiving state of mind that often follows a checkmate. Hence that "agony of rage and disappointment from which," said Sydney Smith, "the Bishop of broke my head with a chess-board fifty years ago at college."

But did we say that ladies, famed as some have been in the hunting field, know anything of cricket too? Not often; though I could have mentioned two,—the wife and daughter of the late William Ward, all three now no more, who could tell you—the daughter especially—the forte and the failing of every player at Lord's. I accompanied them home one evening, to see some records of the game, to their humble abode in Connaught Terrace, where many an ornament reminded me of the former magnificence of the Member for the City, the Bank Director, and the great Russia merchant; and I thought of his mansion in the