Ranjitsinhji at his best was more of a magician with the bat, that Johnny
Briggs made you laugh more with his wonderful antics, that A.P. Lucas had
more finish, Palairet more grace, and so on. But it was the abundance of
the old man with the black beard that was so wonderful. You never came to
the end of him. He was like a generous roast of beef--you could cut and
come again, and go on coming. Other men flitted across our sky like
meteors, but he shone on like the sun in the heavens, and like the sun in
the heavens he scattered largesse over the land. He did not seem so much a
man as an institution, a symbol of summer and all its joys, a sort of
Father Christmas clothed in flannels and sunshine. It did you good merely
to look at him. It made you feel happy to see such a huge capacity for
enjoyment, such mighty subtlety, such ponderous gaiety. It was as though
Jove, or Vulcan, or some other god of antiquity had come down to play games
with the mortals. You would not have been much surprised if, when the
shadows lengthened across the greensward and the umpire signalled that the
day's play was done, he had wrapped himself in a cloud of glory and floated
away to Olympus.

And now he is gone indeed, and it seems as though a part, and that a very
happy part, of my life has gone with him. When sanity returns to the earth,
there will arise other deities of the cricket field, but not for me. Never
again shall I recapture the careless rapture that came with the vision of
the yellow cap flaming above the black beard, of the Herculean frame and
the mighty bared arms, and all the godlike apparition of the master. As I
turned out of the little station and passed through the fields and climbed
the hill I felt that the darkness that has come upon the earth in these
days had taken a deeper shade of gloom, for even the lights of the happy
past were being quenched.