The Veteran Cricketer

My old cricketer was seized, he says, some score of years ago now, by
sciatica, clutched indeed about the loins thereby, and forcibly
withdrawn from the practice of the art; since when a certain
predisposition to a corpulent habit has lacked its natural check of
exercise, and a broadness almost Dutch has won upon him. Were it not for
this, which renders his contours and his receding aspect unseemly, he
would be indeed a venerable-looking person, having a profile worthy of a
patriarch, tinged though it may be with an unpatriarchal jollity, and a
close curly beard like that of King David. He lives by himself in a
small cottage outside the village--hating women with an unaccountable
detestation--and apparently earns a precarious livelihood, and certainly
the sincere aversion of the country side, by umpiring in matches, and
playing whist and "Nap" with such as will not be so discreet and
economical as to bow before his superior merit.

His neighbours do not like him, because he will not take their cricket
or their whist seriously, because he will persist in offering counsel
and the stimulus of his gift of satire. All whist than his he avers is
"Bumble-puppy." His umpiring is pedagogic in tone; he fails to see the
contest in the game. To him, who has heard his thousands roar as the
bails of the best of All England went spinning, these village matches
are mere puerile exercises to be corrected. His corrections, too, are
Olympian, done, as it were, in red ink, vivid, and without respect of
persons. Particularly he gibes. He never uses vulgar bad language
himself, but has a singular power of engendering it in others. He has a
word "gaby," which he will sometimes enlarge to "stuppid gaby," the
which, flung neatly into a man who has just missed a catch, will fill
the same with a whirl of furious curses difficult to restrain. And if
perchance one should escape, my ancient cricketer will be as startled as
Cadmus at the crop he has sown. And not only startled but pained at
human wickedness and the follies of a new generation. "Why can't you
play without swearing, Muster Gibbs?" he will say, catching the
whispered hope twenty yards away, and proclaiming it to a censorious
world. And so Gibbs, our grocer and draper, and one made much of by the
vicar, is shamed before the whole parish, and damned even as he desired.

To our vicar, a well-meaning, earnest, and extremely nervous man, he
displays a methodical antagonism. Our vicar is the worst of all possible
rural vicars--unripe, a glaring modern, no classical scholar, no lover
of nature, offensively young and yet not youthful, an indecent
politician. He was meant to labour amid Urban Myriads, to deal with
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