The Wonder

ils that can never be forgotten while cricket holds place as our national game. But there are many facts of Stott's life familiar to me,

lesworth where she had immigrant relations, and it was there that she set up the little paper-shop, the business by which she maintained herself and her boy. That shop

turdy, freckled, sandy-haired boy who used to go round with the morning

this thoroughness that kept him engaged in his mother's little business until he was seventeen. Up to t

arently, that determined

being played behind the screen erected to shut out non-paying sightseers. Among the horses' feet, squirming between the spokes of wheels, utterly regardless of all injury, small boys glued their eyes to knot-holes in the fence, while others climbed surreptitiously, and for the most part unobserved, on to the ba

the genius of the thick-set, fair-haired youth of seventeen, who paused on that early September afternoon to wonder what all the fuss was about. The Ailesworth County

pierced his absorption in the business he had

he asked of P

tly curved top of his butcher's cart-made no appropriate answer.

at encircled Puggy's platform, and with a sudden hoist that lifted the

ng, tottering Puggy. "Wha

n his end of the see-saw, and, finding himself still able to preserve

?" asked G

ed Puggy. "Oh! Gow on, gow on

and turned his atte

, the deciding match of the Minor Counties championship. Hampdenshire and Oxfordshire, old rivals, had been neck-and-ne

fixed place in the Eleven. Ginger knew him socially, but they were not friends, they had no interests in common. Bobby had made twenty-seven. He was partnered

his wicket up, but not to score. The hopes of Ailesworth centred in the ability of that almost untried colt Bobby Maisefield-and he seemed likely to ju

" he shouted. "Oh!

ith a sheet, stonewalled the most tempting lob, the click of the ball on his bat was an intrusion on the stillness. And always it was followed by a deep breath of relief that sighed round the ring lik

on their fast bowler again, and Trigson, intimidated, perhaps, did not play him with quite so straight a bat as he had opposed to the lob-bowler. The ball hit Trigson's bat and glanced through the slips. The field was very

elling incoherent words. And he was representative of the crowd. Thus men shouted and stamped and cried when news

wait to see the chairing of Bobby and Trigson. The greatness of Stott's character, the fineness

und vent in a muttered sentence which is peculiarly

d have bowled tha