One verse of it,
"Oh! the effervescing tingle,
How it rushes in the veins!
Till the water seems to mingle
With the pulses and the brains,"
exactly expresses the reason why, as a boy, I loved Ducker so.
Unfortunately, I never played cricket for Harrow at "Lords," as my
two brothers George and Ernest did. My youngest brother would, I
think, have made a great name for himself as a cricketer, had not
the fairies endowed him at his birth with a fatal facility for
doing everything easily. As the result of this versatility, his
ambitions were continually changing. He accordingly abandoned
cricket for steeplechase riding, at which he distinguished himself
until politics ousted steeplechase riding. After some years,
politics gave place to golf and music, which were in their turn
supplanted by photography. He then tried writing a few novels, and
very successful some of them were, until it finally dawned on him
that his real vocation in life was that of a historian. My brother
was naturally frequently rallied by his family on his inconstancy
of purpose, but he pleaded in extenuation that versatility had
very marked charms of its own.
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