XXxii MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 
he often used to tell how the people cheered him 
through the streets after some great batting or 
bowling display. In the memory of at least one 
inhabitant of that town, his powers of hitting were, 
fifteen years after he had laid down the bat for good 
and all, still enshrined, as the following anecdote 
will show. One of Mr. Foster-Melliar’s sons was 
batting on the Stowmarket ground, and an elderly 
man was fielding at point, a ball was bowled rather 
to the off and pitched rather short, the batsman 
hit it with all his strength straight into point’s 
hands, point stopped it, dropped it and started 
jumping about and shaking his hands. Fearing 
lest he had broken one of his fingers, for the ball 
was going very fast, the batsman went up to him 
and hoped he was not hurt. No, he wasn’t hurt, 
but he was annoyed. It was fifteen years since he 
had had a ball like that, and he had dropped that 
one too, and he had never known but one person 
who could hit a ball like that, and was the batsman’s 
name Foster-Melliar? In these days of socialistic 
enterprise, 1t is just as well to remember that the 
hereditary principle will occasionally assert itself. 
In his youth Mr. Foster-Melliar was a keen fly 
fisherman but, in latter years he did not do much, 
if any, fishing. But the trout pool, hidden beneath 
the old elm and among the roses, was one of his 
pleasures. There, on summer evenings, he would 
sit for hours feeding the fat trout with bread and 
earwigs, the latter of which he would blow on to the 
water by means of hollow tubes. He has described 
in his book how he used to catch the earwigs in those 
hollow tubes. 
His great passion, however, was shooting. He 
