A CRICKET WEEK
I
By the time that Pip had reached his twenty-fifth year his name was scarcely less familiar to the man in the street than that of the leading picture-postcard divinity, and considerably more so than that, say, of the President of the Royal Academy. The English are a strange race, and worship strange gods. Pip's admission to the national Pantheon had been secured by the fact of his having been mainly responsible for the sensational dismissal of the Australians, for an infinitesimal score, in the second innings of the third Test Match.
The morning papers referred to him as "that phenomenal trundler, the young Middlesex amateur"; the sporting press hailed him as "the left-handed devastation-merchant"; and the evening "specials" called him "Pip," pure and simple.
To do him
