k" stroke. Most fine batsmen are content to stop short straight
balls on a fast wicket. Ranji is more ambitious. When he sees a ball of
this kind coming, he stands directly in front of his wicket, and at the
moment when the ball is apparently on the point of going through his
body, he "hooks" it round to leg.

How hazardous this proceeding is may be gathered from the obvious fact
that if the batsman fails to get his bat exactly in the proper place in
exactly the proper fraction of a second, he will infallibly have to
retire either with a fractured skull or "leg before wicket."

[Illustration: RANJI FIELDING.]

While the cricket scribes used to regard Ranjitsinhji's good fortune in
escaping a violent end while playing this speciality of his as a
supernatural gift, practical cricketers consider the stroke bad form.
"That leg stroke of yours," said an old player to him in the pavilion
at Lord's, "is all very well now and then, but it's not cricket; it's
far too risky. If you miss the ball, you're bound to be out leg before."
"Quite so," replied Ranji; "but one would be out pretty frequently,
clean bowled, if one missed the ball--every time a straight ball came,
in fact."

Ranjitsinhji's batting has been variously described as satanic,
electric, and elusive. "Serpentine" would be far more accurate. Anyone
in the least familiar with the famous Indian's style will at once see
the point of the epithet.

The line of beauty, we all know, is a curve; and the real secret of the
attractiveness of Ranji's batting (from the spectators' point of view)
is that every position he assumes seems to be laid out in a curve.

In the illustration on page 215 "Rip" has but very slightly exaggerated
the effect of the sinuous curves into which Ranji's body resolves itself
before he makes a stroke. That he can unbend faster than any other
cricketer past or present is an incontestable fact. The yarn of how in a
match at Cambridge he once brought off a catch with such amazing
rapidity that the batsman, under the impression that the ball had
travelled near the boundary, continued running till Ranji extracted the
ball from his pocket, is most likely apocryphal; but to anyone who has
seen him fielding slip the feat ascribed to him won't seem impossible.

[Illustration: RANJI BATTING--A STUDY IN GRACEFUL POSE.]

By the way, it's an odd thing that while Ranjitsinhji's batting owes its
attractiveness to the "curves" of the batsman, an equally grac