"Peter McQubae, Captain.

"To Admiral Sir WH Gage, GCH, Devonport."

Consequently, having this testimony, which was amply verified by the
other witnesses at the time, I see no reason to doubt the truth of Jim
Newman's yarn about THE GREAT SEA SERPENT!

CHAPTER FIVE.

"OUR SCRATCH ELEVEN."

This all happened a year or two before I went to sea, and so doesn't
come under the ordinary designation of a "yarn," which, I take it,
should only be about the doings of seafaring men and those who have to
toil over the ocean for a living; still, as it concerns myself, I give
it in pretty nearly the exact words I told it the other day to a party
of youngsters who had just come in from cricketing and asked me for a
story.

I never played in such a match in my life before or since, I began; but,
there, I had better commence at the right end, and then you'll be able
to judge for yourselves.

Charley Bates, of course, was dead against it from the first.

"I tell you it's all nonsense," he said, when we mooted the subject to
him. "How on earth can we get up a decent eleven to play chaps like
those, who have been touring it all over the country, and licking
professionals even on their own ground? It's impossible, and a
downright absurdity. We can't do it."

"But, Charley," suggested Sidney Grant, a tall, fair-haired fellow, and
our best bat--he could swipe away at leg balls; and as for straight
drives, well, he'd send 'em over a bowler's head, just out of his reach,
and right to the boundary wall, at such a rate, like an express train
going through the air, that they defied stopping. "But, Charley," he
suggested, "we've got some good ones left of our team, and I daresay we
can pick up some fresh hands from amongst the visitors to make up a fair
scratch lot."

"It would be a scratch lot," sneered Charley--"a lot that would be
scratched out with duck's eggs, and make us the laughing-stock of the
place."

"Oh, that's all nonsense!" Sidney said, decisively.

Besides being our best bat, he was the captain of the Little Peddlington
Cricket Club, which, as it was far into the month of August, had got
somewhat dispersed through some of the team having gone off on those
cheap excursions to London, to the Continent, and elsewhere, that are
rife at most of the seaside places on the south coast during the season.
But now that the great travelling team of the "Piccadilly Inimitables"
purposed paying a passing visit to our ru