SHIELDS' AND THE CRICKET CUP


The house cricket cup at Wrykyn has found itself on some strange
mantelpieces in its time. New talent has a way of cropping up in the
house matches. Tail-end men hit up fifties, and bowlers who have never
taken a wicket before except at the nets go on fifth change, and
dismiss first eleven experts with deliveries that bounce twice and
shoot. So that nobody is greatly surprised in the ordinary run of
things if the cup does not go to the favourites, or even to the second
or third favourites. But one likes to draw the line. And Wrykyn drew
it at Shields'. And yet, as we shall proceed to show, Shields' once
won the cup, and that, too, in a year when Donaldson's had four first
eleven men and Dexter's three.

Shields' occupied a unique position at the School. It was an
absolutely inconspicuous house. There were other houses that were
slack or wild or both, but the worst of these did something. Shields'
never did anything. It never seemed to want to do anything. This may
have been due in some degree to Mr. Shields. As the housemaster is, so
the house is. He was the most inconspicuous master on the staff. He
taught a minute form in the junior school, where earnest infants
wrestled with somebody's handy book of easy Latin sentences, and
depraved infants threw cunningly compounded ink-balls at one another
and the ceiling. After school he would range the countryside with a
pickle-bottle in search of polly woggles and other big game, which he
subsequently transferred to slides and examined through a microscope
till an advanced hour of the night. The curious part of the matter