A PORTUGUESE IDEA OF CRICKET.

When the English residents of Lisbon and Oporto started cricket in Portugal years ago, the new game excited great wonder among the natives, the Portuguese people, who find no pleasure in athletic sports or in muscular exercise generally, being puzzled at the idea of wealthy people engaging in such laborious work. On the occasion of the first match at Lisbon between the two clubs, the Lisbon Journal thus reported it:

CRICKET-MATCH.-Tomorrow there was to have come off an interesting game of cricket between the cricket clubs of Lisbon and Oporto. The object of the formation of these societies is the playing of the game of cricket-match, an active, running, driving, jumping game, which only can be played by a person having a good pair of legs and in a climate where warmed punch is found insufficient to keep up the animal heat. Does the reader know how to play a game at cricket-match? Two posts are placed at a great distance from one another. The player, close to one of the posts, throws a large ball towards the other party, who awaits the ball to send it far with a small stick with which he is armed. The other players then run to look after the ball, and while this search is going on the party who struck it with the stick runs incessantly from post to post, marking one for each run. It is plain, then, that it is to the advantages of the party who strikes the ball to make it jump very far. Sometimes it tumbles into a thicket, and the players take hours before they can get hold of it; and all this time the player does not cease running from post to post and marking points. Then those who find the ball arrive exhausted at the field of battle, and the one who has been running falls down half dead. At other times the projectile sent with a vigorous arm cannot be stopped, and breaks the legs of the party who awaits it. The arrangements for the cricket-match include a sumptuous dinner in the marquee for fifty persons-an indispensable accompaniment to every cricket-match. [Ex.