interests, so that when the season of 1921 is with us the happiness of
the cricket spectator may be even greater than it has been in the one
now expiring.

I am going to devote the time to invention. With every grain of
intellect and ingenuity that I can scrape together I am going to
devise a means of humanising the tea interval.

Once upon a time I was so rash as to ridicule this interruption. I
drew attention to the fact that the ancient heroes of the game had
been able to dispense with it. ALFRED MYNN needed no Asiatic stimulant
between lunch and the close of play. Even such whole-hearted moderns as
HORNBY and SHREWSBURY and GRACE managed to do well without the support
of Hyson or Bohea. For more than a century cricket and tea were
strangers and cricket did not suffer. And so on. But the attacks were
futile: the tea interval became an institution; and nothing now, one
realises, can ever occur to separate the gallant fellows from their
cups and saucers.

That being accepted, the problem is how to make the interval at once
less harmful to the match and more tolerable to the lover of cricket;
and it is on this problem that I have been working and intend to work
through the arid football months. What has to be done is (_a_) to get
the interval abbreviated; and (_b_) to keep the players on the field.
It is the length of it and the empty pitch that are so depressing
to the spectator, and it is the return to the pavilion that is so
detrimental to the rhythm of the game. Neither of the batsmen ever
wants the interruption, and I have often noticed a reluctance in
certain members of the fielding side. As for the watchers, they never
fail to groan.