Excerpt from How to Play Lawn Tennis: Containing Pracitical Instruction From an Expert Lawn tennis is played by two, three or four people (though very seldom by three) on a smooth stretch of ground called a court. The playing surface of this court is 27 feet (for singles), or 36 feet (for doubles) in width and 78 feet in length, and it is laid out on a level surface of grass or turf, or occasion ally on a board floor under a covered roof in winter. The court is marked out with white lines on the ground indicating the boundaries, and the space is divided in two by a net three feet in height stretched across the centre from side to side. Each player is armed with a racket. Which is a wooden frame about a foot long and eight inches wide, the oval open space being covered with a fine network of catgut strings, and the frame supplied with a handle about 15 inches long. With this racket the players strike a ball 2% inches in diameter, of rubber filled with compressed air and covered with felt. This ball is knocked from one side of the net to the other back and forth until one side misses it - that is, fails to hit it at all, or knocks it into the net, or out of the court. Either side scores a point when the opponent. Fails to return the ball into his court. The object of the game, therefore, is to knock the ball into the opponent's court so that he cannot return it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.