“Yes, sir,” was the reply.
“Then bring me my spectacles,” said Mr. Hitquick.
“If you please, sir, a boy have walked over with this from Little Mugborough, and he’s a-vaiting below for a hanswer.”
“Very well, Samuel,” said Mr. Hitquick, as he adjusted his spectacles and opened the letter. “Why! dear me! What’s this?”
‘The Secretary of the Little Mugborough Lawn-Tennis Club presents his compliments to Mr. Hitquick, and begs to inform him that two members of his Club will be glad to play any two members of the Hitquick Association at four o’clock this afternoon.’
“Why! a challenge,” said Mr. Hitquick. “Of course, we will meet them. Let me see there’s Shortgrass and Cutman, two active men in the prime of life, who tell me they generally offer half-thirty in mixed country society; the very thing. Here, take this, Samuel.”
“It strikes me wery forcibly,” said Samuel to himself with a wink, “that, if those two gents don’t look a bit more spry this afternoon than I have ever seen them ven I have had the extreme privilege of vatching their performances, the Hitquick Club will have a very considerable wopping,”—and, whistling to himself, he went off with the letter.
Now, it must be confessed that neither Mr. Shortgrass nor Mr. Cutman were such performers on the Tennis-lawn as they had led their worthy President, Mr. Hitquick, to believe, nor as they had described themselves in their after-dinner conversations, as they sipped the soft claret for which the Hitquick Club was so deservedly famous; though certain papers which they had read before the members of the Association had, no doubt, stamped them as theoretical professors of no mean order.
Notably, a paper by Mr. Cutman on “Atmospheric resistance to the Cutman service in the latitude of Greenwich” (a lecture suggested by certain accurate memoranda, prepared by the statist of the Club, to the effect that only ’17 of these services so far overcame it as to pass over the net), had placed him in the front ranks of Lawn-tennis theorists; while a lecture by Mr. Shortgrass, on “Suspected tidal attraction on the Shortgrass lob” (accounting for the discovery by the same scientific observer that it almost always completed its parabola on Mr. Shortgrass’s side of the net), had brought him, too, into a leading position amongst spheric scientists.
At four o’clock, however, Mr. Shortgrass and Mr. Cutman stepped upon the lawn, prepared to do battle for the Hitquickians, and were soon confronted by the team from Little Mugborough.