Chapter Five.
“Our Scratch Eleven.”
This all happened a year or two before I went to sea, and so doesn’t come under the ordinary designation of a “yarn,” which, I take it, should only be about the doings of seafaring men and those who have to toil over the ocean for a living; still, as it concerns myself, I give it in pretty nearly the exact words I told it the other day to a party of youngsters who had just come in from cricketing and asked me for a story.
I never played in such a match in my life before or since, I began; but, there, I had better commence at the right end, and then you’ll be able to judge for yourselves.
Charley Bates, of course, was dead against it from the first.
“I tell you it’s all nonsense,” he said, when we mooted the subject to him. “How on earth can we get up a decent eleven to play chaps like those, who have been touring it all over the country, and licking professionals even on their own ground? It’s impossible, and a downright absurdity. We can’t do it.”
“But, Charley,” suggested Sidney Grant, a tall, fair-haired fellow, and our best bat—he could swipe away at leg balls; and as for straight drives, well, he’d send ’em over a bowler’s head, just out of his reach, and right to the boundary wall, at such a rate, like an express train going through the air, that they defied stopping. “But, Charley,” he suggested, “we’ve got some good ones left of our team, and I daresay we can pick up some fresh hands from amongst the visitors to make up a fair scratch lot.”
“It would be a scratch lot,” sneered Charley—“a lot that would be scratched out with duck’s eggs, and make us the laughing-stock of the place.”