My eye! what a funk I was in.

I could hardly hold the bat.

But I straightened up somehow, and his first ball went by.

The next was frightfully swift, and dead on, but it broke a bit to the leg, and I was just in time to get at it and send it right away between long-leg and long-stop in the elms--a safe five if we'd been running.

And old Bloomfield laughed and said he couldn't wait till the ball was sent up, and said I could turn up at the second-eleven Big practice to-morrow and see how I got on there.