world over, and leave their footprints in Arctic
snows and Arabian sands. It is to this outward
working of the inner fire tliat we owe our great
circumnavigators, travellers, soldiers, and
discoverers. Our English arms have built up half
the railways in the world; our emigrants are on
every sea; we are the harmless Norsemen of the
nineteenth century. We can do (some of us)
without working our brains much, but we Saxons
must all exert our limbs; we pine if we are pent
up at desks and ledgers. We are a race of
walkers, sportsmen, travellers, and craftsmen.
We are (by our arts and colonising) the peaceful
conquerors of the world. The days of the
old red-handed conquest being now (as it is
generally thought) gone by for ever, here these
one-armed men go and caricature the national
tendencies.

Such were my patriotic thoughts when I
trudged down the Old Kent Road—chiefly
remarkable, since the old coaching days, as the
former residence of Mr. Greenacre—and made
my devious way to Pcckham. Under swinging
golden hams, golden gridirons, swaying
concertinas (marked at a very low figure),
past bundles of rusty fire-irons, dirty rolls of
carpets, and corpulent dusty feather-beds—past
deserted-looking horse-troughs and suburban-
looking inns, I took my pilgrim way to the not
very blooming Rye of Peckham.

Rows of brick boxes, called streets, half-isolated
cottages, clung to by affectionate but dusty
vines—eventually a canal, where boatmen
smoked and had dreams of coming traffic—a
sudden outburst of green fields, that made me
think I was looking at streets with green
spectacles on brought me to the trim, neat public-
house known by the pleasant aromatic name of
"The Rosemary Branch."

A trim bar-woman, with, perhaps, rather too
demonstrative a photograph brooch, stood in
front of a row of glass barrels labelled respectively
"Shrub," "Bitters," and "Sampson," the
latter, I have no doubt, a very strong beverage
indeed. Nor did I fail to observe a portrait of
the last winner of the Derby over the fireplace,
and a little stuffed terrier pup above the glass
door leading into the little parlour, where a very
comfortable dinner was smoking.

I procured my ticket, and was shown through
a deserted billiard-room, and down a back lane,
to the cricket-field. I delivered up the blue slip
to a very fat man with a child's voice who sat
with an air of suffering at the entrance-wicket,
and I was in the eccentric creatures' innocent
field of battle.

There they were, the one-legged and the one-
armed, encamped like two neighbouring armies.

Two potboys, girdled with tucked-up aprons
white as the froth of bitter-beer, hurried past
me as if to relieve the thirst of men wounded in
war. After them came odd men carrying more
benches for spectators of the one-armed men's
prowess. The one-armed men were having their
innings; the fielding of their one-legged adversaries,
I could see in a moment, was something
painfully wonderful and ludicrously horrible.

Totally indifferent to the mingled humour and
horror of the day were the costermongers, who,
grouped near the gate, threw a fair-day show
over one section of the field. Those mere boys,
with hard-lined pale faces and insinuating curls
like large fish-hooks on each temple, were totally
absorbed in drawing pence from the people of
Peckham now that the bloom, so long expected,
was undoubtedly on the Rye. There, were
boys shooting down an enormous tin
telescope for nuts; there, were men bowling
clumsily at enormous wooden-headed ninepins.
But the crown of the amusements was that
corduroy-sheathed lad who had, with true
Derby-day alacrity, stuck four slender sticks
into hampers of matted sand, and on those
shivery columns poised hairy cocoa-nuts, gilt
pincushions, and wooden boxes meretriciously
covered. One, two—whiz—whirl; what
beautiful illustrations of the force of gravity
did those boxes and pincushions furnish at
three throws a penny! With what an air of
sagacious and triumphant foresight did the
proprietor bundle up the cudgels under his arm and
gingerly replace the glittering prizes!

But while I dally here the eccentric game
proceeds; so, avoiding the cannon-shot of chance
balls, I pass across the field to the little
windowed shed where the scorer sits opposite to the
signal-post that, with its 4—6—2 in large white
figures, marks the progress of the game. Some
boys are playing with a bundle of the large tin
numerals that lie at the foot of the signboard-post.
Inside the outer and open part of the shed sit a
row of Peckham quidnuncs deeply interested in
the game—a game which, if it were all innings,
I hold would be almost perfect, but, as it is, I
deem to be, on the whole, rather wearisome. I
seated myself on a garden-roller kept to level the
grass, and watched the game. A man driving
two calves out of the way of the players informed
me that the proceeds of the game were for the
benefit of a one-armed man who was going in
when the next wicket went down.

The players were not all Peckham men; that
one-legged bowler, so cleft and ready, I found
was a well-known musical barber, a great dancer,
and I believe a great fisherman, from a distant
part of Essex.

The one-legged men were pretty well with the
bat, but they were rather beaten when it came
to fielding. There was a horrible Holbeinish
fun about the way they stumped, trotted, and
jolted after the ball. A converging rank of
crutches and wooden legs tore down upon the
ball from all sides; while the one-armed men,
wagging their hooks and stumps, rushed madly
from wicket to wicket, fast for a "oner,"faster
for "a twoer." A lean, droll, rather drunk
fellow, in white trousers, was the wit of the
one-leg party. "Peggy" evidently rejoiced in
the fact that he was the lamest man in the field,
one leg being stiff from the hip downwards,
and the wooden prop reaching far above the
knee.

He did not treat the game so much as a
matter of science as an affair of pure fun—of