THE HAPPY GOLFER

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

THE HAPPY GOLFER

BEING SOME EXPERIENCES, REFLECTIONS, AND
A FEW DEDUCTIONS OF A WANDERING PLAYER

BY HENRY LEACH

AUTHOR OF
"THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS," "LETTERS OF A MODERN GOLFER," ETC.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1914

COPYRIGHT

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE SEVEN WONDERS OF GOLF, AND THE ABIDING MYSTERY OF THE GAME, WITH A THOUGHT UPON TRADITIONS AND THEIR VALUE.

The first of the seven wonders of golf is a mysterious fascination that it sets towards mankind, from which, overwhelming and enduring, no people are immune. The game seizes men of all ages, of every nationality, all occupations, dispositions, temperaments—all of them. The charm acts upon men and women alike. Sometimes we have suspected that males are more whole-hearted golfers; but there are circumstances of quick recurrence to cause a doubt, and even were there none the fancied difference would be capable of explanation. It has nearly become an established rule that they golf the most who golf the last, for there is no man of the links so keen, so simple and humble in his abandonment to the game, as he who but lately held aloof and laughed, with many a gibe upon the madness of the class. Savages have attempted golf and found they liked it, and the finest intellects are constantly exercised upon its difficulties. So this diversion, pastime, game has become a thing of everywhere and everybody as no other sport of any kind has ever done. The number of people who play no golf decreases daily, and events of the last ten years have shown that its supremacy as the chief of games is sure. It is clear, indeed, that, so far as the numbers attached to it are concerned, it is still only at its beginning, in toddling infancy. A few years hence its intimate part in general life will be better realised; even now you do not so frequently ask a man of movement and intelligence whether he plays golf or not as what his handicap may be and what kind of ball he likes the best. No other game or sport exercises anything like such power of fascination upon its people as this. A tennis-player may leave tennis if he must; the cricketer often voluntarily gives up cricket for no compelling reason; a man of the hills and moors may cease to care for shooting; and one who has made an automobile speed like the wind along the roads may sell his car and be motorist nevermore. But the golfer will and must always golf, and never less but more while strength permits. Men who go to the sea in ships take golf clubs with them; I have known golfers carry their materials into deserts, and one of the greatest and noblest explorers the world has known took them with him to one far end of earth. Surely this is a very remarkable thing, a feature of life that is strange as it is strong, and it is not nonsense to suggest that this is no ordinary game and cannot be considered as a game like others. Somewhere in a mysterious way it touches the springs of life, makes emotions shake. It grips; it twitches at the senses. Why?

No person has yet answered that question well and with decision, though many have attempted to do so in written words, and ten thousand times and more have players in their talk touched upon the lasting problem, and then, with that natural human avoidance of the impossible, have shuffled off to some topic more amenable. Here, it seemed, was one of the mysteries of life, and these are such as it is better not to meddle with. So through neglect and our timidity the problem has seemed to deepen. It has become the Great Mystery. Wonder and awe are thick about it. Men who were innocent and have turned to golf do not give a reason why; they are silent to the questioner. They say that he too will see in time, and then they golf exceedingly. Surely, then, this Great Mystery of its fascination is the first of the seven wonders of golf; and it is appropriate enough that a game that covers the world and embraces all mankind should have special and well-separated wonders numbering seven like the seven others of the earth at large: the traditions of the game, its amazing ubiquity, St. Andrews, the short putt, the achievements of golfers, and the rubber-cored ball are the other six. Each has its well-established place, and between the seventh of the group and the eighth, being chief of the thousand minor wonders, there is a wide separation.

§

It is not for one poor atom in a great and complex golfing world to put forward with any look of dogma a suggested solution to this subtle mystery which the philosophers have probed so long and fruitlessly. He will subscribe with others in a consoling renunciation to the view that it is not for human mortals, who should be happy with delights that are given them, to tear down veils from the faces of hidden gods. But as a theory—shall we say?—he may advance an explanation which is satisfying to one who has wondered as much as any others and inquired as often during many years, while yet it still leaves a place for mystery and a suggestion of eternal doubt. And the chief difference between this theory and others that have preceded it is that this is what might be called Collective while the others have commonly been theories of single ideas. Philosophic research towards the solution of the mystery hitherto has been almost exclusively based upon the supposition of there being one peculiar unknown cause for the amazing fascination, a magnificent x, something that in our present imperfect state of knowledge could hardly be imagined, but which has been vaguely conceived to be connected in some ways with the senses—and maybe the spirit. We have known that in some mysterious and it has seemed almost supernatural way the emotions have been stirred, most deeply shaken, by the pursuit of golf, and the case has seemed so inexplicable that the existence of an overwhelming unknown factor for the cause has been suspected. Here investigation has naturally faltered. I myself for long enough was inclined to the possibility of the single-cause theory being correct, and with devotion was attached to that "Hope" suggestion which satisfied most requirements and went far towards an explanation of all the mysteries. That this doctrine, whose merits shall be considered, is largely correct, that it does account for much of the mystery, I am well convinced; but we who have studied in the latest schools of philosophy are now unwilling to believe that it accounts completely for everything, that, in fact, this hope, which the circumstances of the game cause to flame continually in the golfer's mind like the great human passion that it is, is the one and only Force of golf, though it is almost certainly the major force of a group and dominates the others. Our new idea for a solution to the grand mystery is that there is a number of forces or causes of widely different character but associated in complete harmony for the production of strong emotional effects in the mind of the subject—emotions of the simplest and most natural character, but, like others touching at the mainsprings of life, in their action most intense. In a simple, unanalytical, and rather unphilosophical way, the game of golf has often been compared to the game of life, just indeed as other games and pursuits have been pointed for comparisons with the process of human existence. So we have been exhibited as starting in life at the teeing ground, abounding in hope and possibility. The troubles, ills, and worries that have soon afflicted us have been found their counterparts, all the analogies made to suit the careful people who play short of hazards and enjoy a smooth existence, the bold adventurers who brave long carries and like best the romantic road, the deep bunkers of misfortune, the constant menace of the rough for those who hesitate upon the straight and narrow way, the unexpected gifts of Providence when long putts are holed, the erratic inclination of the poor human when the little ones are missed. But now we find that in a far deeper and more consequential way this sympathy between golf and life exists, and that in this gentle play there is a repetition in lighter tones of the throbbing theme of existence.

In the strong action upon the emotions which takes place during the practice of the game there are effects which are purely physical and others which are largely mental and spiritual. The physical thrills of golf are above the comprehension of any man or woman who has not played the game. We are certain that in the whole range of sport or human exercise there is nothing that is quite so good as the sublime sensation, the exquisite feeling of physical delight, that is gained in the driving of a golf ball with a wooden club in the manner that it ought to be driven. This last provision is emphasised, for this is a matter of style and action, and the sensuous thrill is gained from the exertion of physical strength in such a mechanically, scientifically, and physically perfect manner as to produce an absolute harmony of graceful movement. It is as the satisfaction and thanks of Nature. Sometimes we hear sportsmen speak of certain sensations derived from particular strokes at cricket, others of an occasional sudden ecstasy in angling, and one may well believe that life runs strong in the blood when a man shoots his first tiger or his first wild elephant. But the feelings of golf are subtler, sweeter, and that we are not stupidly prejudiced or exclusive for the game may be granted if it is suggested that we reach some way to the golf sensations in two other human exercises, the one being in the dancing of the waltz when done thoroughly well and with a fine rhythmical swing, and the other when skating on the ice with full and complete abandon. In each case it is a matter of perfect poise, of the absolute perfection of co-ordination of human movement, of the thousands of little muscular items of the system working as one, and of the truest rhythm and harmony being thus attained. We come near to it also in some forms of athletics; we have it suggested in the figures of the Greek throwing the discus. In golf there is an enormous concentration of this effect in the space of a couple of seconds—not too long to permit of becoming accustomed to it, not too short for proper appreciation. In this brief time, if the driving is properly done as Nature would have it, the emotional sensation is tremendous. Again one insists on the method and manner, for, especially in late years, ways of driving have been cultivated as the result of the agreeability of the rubber-cored ball, in which the physical movements are restricted and changed, and nearly all of the thrills are lost. It is still, even then, a fine thing to drive a good ball; there is peculiar satisfaction and a sense of smooth pleasure felt in doing so; but it is not that great whole-body thing that is enjoyed when there is the long swing and the full finish. That is why, even if style be so difficult to attain and there are ways of playing which are far easier to cultivate and more certain of their good results, it is worth all the pains and study expended in acquiring it, and a hundred times again, for the pleasure that comes afterwards. In the winning of holes or in the making of low scores the driving may be a comparatively unimportant part of the play, as it is said to be, though a certain high standard of efficiency is demanded continually; but it will always be the favourite part of the game because it appeals so much to those physical emotions, stirs them up so violently, rouses the life of the man, and lifts him for a moment to a full appreciation of the perfection of the human system. Some of these emotions are experienced in a minor key when playing the short game, as we call it, particularly in finely-made pitching strokes with iron clubs. Here there are restraint and sweetness; it is as if we listen to the delicacy of Mendelssohn after the strength and stateliness of Beethoven. Undoubtedly there are keen physical sensations enjoyed in this part of the play. When it comes to the last and shortest strokes, to the putting, only a faint trace of action upon the physical emotions remains, and the pleasure and satisfaction—if any—that are gained are purely mental. So in the short space of five minutes, in playing one hole of fair length, we may run along a full gamut of emotions, and herein is a great part of the joy of golf.

§

This, however, would be insufficient. The strong, self-controllable man would not, in their absence, crave for these emotions. But other influences are at work to kindle and continue the golfing fever in him. For the highest and deepest pleasure of civilised and cultivated man a combination of the best physical and mental emotions—with a little disappointment and grief—is essential; one without the other is always unsatisfying. Here, foremost among the mental experiences, so powerful as to have a certain physical influence, is our Hope. The major force of all life is hope. It is life itself, for without it the scheme of human existence would collapse. To look forward, to anticipate, to hope for better things, and believe in them—that is the principle of life. It is for that reason that the atheist comes so near to being an impossibility. An incredible he is. He asserts himself not only as an ignorer of gods but as a rejecter of Nature, and his position is untenable, impossible. He endeavours to place himself outside the scheme of creation. Without hope man could not and would not continue. He would give up. Motive would have vanished, and motive is essential to action. We strain analogy to no extravagance when we hold that it is the same in golf. It is pervaded with hope, lives on it, is played with it, depends upon it throughout in its every phase. At the beginning of the day's play a man hopes for great achievement. He does not ignore the possibilities, and rarely, whatever his temperament and disposition, does he wait for events, content in a manner of perfect wisdom to take things as they come. He anticipates, and in the human way he builds castles made of thoughts, and in his calculations overlooks existing facts and past experience. Thus are charm, eagerness, and romance given to life and the game. Never yet was golfer who did not believe that now his great day might come.

So on the first teeing ground there is hope in the highest. Should the first stroke be successful the hope is stimulated; if the stroke is bad the hope is intensified. In the one case something more of the human power of man, the strong right arm and the fingers deft, is poured into the physical and temperamental boiler where the forces are being generated. The success has increased probability, the man can a little the more stand by himself, his independence increases, and his hope has a rock of fact beneath it. In the other event, the first drive having been a failure—as, alas! with the wearinesses of waiting and the anxieties they engender, first drives so often are—the hope is intensified by the addition of highly concentrated faith. The element of the practical indefatigable man is slightly reduced, and in its place there is filled the sublimer, grander essence of spirituality that is so far above the merely human. The hope is not the less. Providence is brought into the schemes, and the heart lives well. If the second shot is a good one there is more of the human given to the hope and the spiritual is a little subdued again; if the stroke should fail there is something like another mute appeal subconsciously made to Providence.

These are the hopes of strokes. There are the hopes for holes; the hopes for days; the hopes for seasons, each series being units made of collections as years are made of months and days are made of hours. One who loses the first hole hopes to win the second, and is even insincere, for the encouragement of his hope, in saying and trying to believe that to lose the first hole does not matter and is often an advantage. If the second is lost there is a coming equality in the match imagined for the fourth or fifth. Three or four down at the turn, even five, and the man still lives and hopes (he is no golfer if he does not), and there have been magnificent struggles made when players have been six down with seven to play, or have even been dormy five to the bad. He who has only lost the first hole holds his hope in a state that is highly charged with belief in his own human capacity; he who is dormy down when the match is far from home still keeps hope, is buoyed well with it, but he does his best in a half-cheerful, half-nervous way, knowing that the time for supreme human endeavour has passed, and he gives the matter over to kind Providence, submitting that his deserts are good. So one who has played badly in the morning hopes for success in the afternoon; and where is the man who, having made poor shots all the day and lost holes and matches by them, does not fall to sleep at night consoled and peaceful in reflecting upon a discovery that will make full amends upon the morrow? After the failures of a summer season hopes arise for better fare when cool autumn makes the play more pleasant; when there has been one whole bad year there is hope enough that the game will mend in the time that follows.

In this way it is hope all through, hope always, in the beginning and the end and in the small things with the great. Hope is the most human, most uplifting of all the emotions. Banish this emotional quality from the human mind and the golf clubs would be disbanded, for the game would cease to be golf for another day. The charm would have gone completely. Only the nature of the hope sometimes varies as we have shown, and the most wonderful feature of this wonder of golf is the sublimely simple way in which the man of a match, when all seems lost, when the cause seems wholly ruined, when by nothing human does it seem that a situation hanging upon a thread so thin can possibly be saved, believes in the future still. Providence still exists for him. Every human reckoning would show that he approaches the impossible, and yet he sees it not, but only the narrow way of escape to success beyond. And there is infinite satisfaction to the soul, much that is splendidly destructive of utter materialism, in realising that often the seeming human impossibility is broken and Providence pulls us through. In golf we often ask for miracles, and sometimes we obtain them. It seems to me that the golfer has one satisfying motto, and only one, and it is Spero meliora. What is the use of the "far and sure" that the ancients have bequeathed to us? Nearly meaningless it is. And if those words of hope are emblazoned on his coat of arms, the golfing man should have the Watts picture of "Hope" in his private chamber, courageous Hope straining for the faintest note that comes from the one lone string that remains on the almost dismantled harp.

§

Such strong exercises of emotions, physical and soulful, accounting, as we may believe, for much of the fascination of the game, are supported by others, subtler but also of large effect. There are the aggravations of the game. It suggests an object that no man has ever completely achieved and never will do, since none has ever arisen to a state of skill and consistency when he plays perfect golf and plays it always, though such success may nearly be achieved at other pastimes. And it is not given to the player to know why the skill he feels himself possessed of does not bear its fruit. He is left in wonderment and aggravation. The game goads, it taunts, it mocks unmercifully. Old Tom Morris expressed the simplest overwhelming truth when he said it was "aye fechtin' against us." It does so from the first hour, the first minute of the golfer's existence as such, when he misses the ball which it had seemed so easy to strike. Then, his vanity wounded, he attacks, and the lifelong feud begins. What always seems so easy becomes the nearly impossible. There is always something new to learn, always another scrap of explanation of mystery to be gathered, and the player is always groping and being taught. But he moves forward only to fall back again, and the simple consolation he has from this ever-recurring process is that the tide of discovery, when it rolls back, returns a little higher up the beach with the next wave and in the long succession there is a gain. But this process is not so regular as the running of the tide, not so much a matter of calculable natural law, and therein is the disappointment and the aggravation. A man retires to his rest at night feeling himself a good and well-satisfied golfer with rapid advancement certain, and lo! the morning will be little spent when he is shown to himself as one of the poorest and most ineffectual players. The mystery of this reaction is quite insoluble; only the cold fact is clear, convincing. No more tantalising will-o'-the-wisp is there than form at golf. It is a game that lures a man, it coquets with him, trifles with his yearnings and his hopes, and flouts him. So does it excite him, and, hurting his pride, stirs his ambition and his desire to obtain the mastery. The spirit of adventure and conquest is aroused, and the strong man who has failed in no undertaking before declares that he will not fail in this. And so, with his everlasting hope, he perseveres and will not give in. But it is the game that wins.

It appeals to the emotions of the primitive man in another way that may often be unsuspected. In essence it is the simplest and the most natural of games. It is indeed a game of Nature, and it is played not on the smoothest surfaces with white lines drawn upon them, but upon plain grass-covered earth, a little smoothed by man but still with abounding natural roughness and simplicity. Here on the links are space and freedom such as are afforded to people, especially those of towns and cities, rarely in present times. The tendency in all life now is to confine itself closely. We live in small spaces, with many walls and low roofs; we move through thronged streets and by underground railways. Things are not the same as when there was the Garden of Eden and the open world outside it. His confinement is a wearing oppression to the modern man, though he may not always suspect it. Because it emancipates and gives us back a little of our lost freedom is the chief reason for the popularity of motoring, and it was to attain more freedom still that man made up his mind to fly and now flies accordingly. We cannot entirely escape from this unnatural confinement which modern conditions of life have forced upon us, but for a little while at intervals, through the medium of this sport, we may experience the sense of space, of freedom, of the something that comes near to infinity. Unconscious of this cause, a golfer on the links is uplifted to a simpler freer self. He has a great open space about him, the wilder the better, and the open sky above. He takes Nature as he finds her, accepting her every mood, and that is why this game is and must be one for all weathers. There is the ball upon the tee. Hit it, golfer, anywhere you please! Hit it far, no limit to the distance! Strike with all your strength! Until in the game the time for wariness comes, as with the hunter upon his prey, see no limitations, accept all consequences. The golfer's freedom has a flavour that other people rarely taste.

Emotions serve the human system better than comforts and conveniences, for these emotions are the pulse of life and the conveniences are mere aids to existence. Golf, being complete, has its advantages of convenience as well as its thrilling emotions, and when the players reason to their relatives and their friends upon the good of the game, shaping their excuses for a strange excess, they exhibit with a limited sincerity the real advantages and conveniences. The game may be played anywhere and everywhere. It is the same in principle, the same in rules, the same in actions; but yet again it is like a new thing everywhere, and it is always fresh. There is a golf course wherever a man may go; and there is a new experience for him always. He needs only one man to play with him; or indeed, if there is no such man available, he may play with the game itself as his implacable opponent, fight it in the open and without the medium of a human opponent to break the shocks for him. If variety is the spice of life, then here is spice enough. Then it gives us such companionship as can be gained by few other means, for it brings us to inner intimacy with the man we play, bares his hidden nature to us, strips from him all those trappings of manner and suggestion by which in the ordinary social scheme every person plays a part as on a stage and rarely is well discovered. No man plays a part in golf; his individuality, in all its goodness and weakness, is unfolded in the light. He is known entirely and for his own true self. The game gives us fresh air and the most splendid exercise. These are enormous advantages in golf, and we extol them in defence of our enthusiasm and they are accepted; yet, honest to ourselves, we know that we do not play golf because of fresh air and exercise, and indeed we only think of them as gain when, in the slavery to which we have been subject, our emotions for a day have been shivered and shocked by failure. It has the advantage that we can play it when the period of life for other games has passed, and we can play while life leaves to us but a flick of vigour. Some of the meanest men, who are barely worthy of being in this excellent community where the sense of brotherhood is so good, have been gross enough to say that golf serves their professional and commercial purposes thoroughly well—as indeed it may—by giving them intimacy with valuable and helpful friends. These are men who would buy their idols and sell them for a profit of five per cent. The advantages of golf are there; but they are the accident of circumstances, or not perhaps the accident but simply like the scheme of Nature in supporting what is good with good itself; but they do not and cannot in any measure explain the mystery of the fascination of the game, for that mystery lies in the emotional, the spiritual, the psychological, and not in anything that is just material. Golf is something of a passion, and passions are of the blood and have nothing to do with conveniences and rules of life for health and plain advantage.

§

The traditions of golf are the second of its wonders. All things that are old have certain traditional sentiment clinging to them, and it makes a good flavouring to life, for it is suggestive of age and time and continuity and eternity. Had golf no traditions now, those emotional effects in its subjects might be produced the same, but yet the sport would not be the same rich colourful thing that we know it to be, but something grosser. And again we could stand for golf and say that no other sport can testify to its past and present worth and greatness with such excellent tradition. Three only can rank in the same class, and those are cricket, hunting, and the turf. Their traditions indeed are rich, they uphold their sports to-day, and they abound in those rare stories which, even if they have lost nothing with time, make fine things for the listening now and have the tendency always to promote a better sporting spirit. But three things are essential to good traditions, the first being acts, the second persons, and the third places, and the last of the three is far from being the least important, because birds do not love their nests more than traditions do the plots of earth where are their homes. They cannot live in space; there they would lapse to a state of film and would fade away. Give them abiding places, real solid ground upon which their delicate ghostly structures may rest, and they have a substance which gives them a fine reality. If a character of the past were invented, given a real name, all his manners and customs, his feats and follies carefully described, even his father and mother most properly identified, and a statement made of the provisions in his will for those who followed after him, that would still be likely to linger on as a character merely, a possibility of the past but a thing of no account, not an influence. He could not be placed. If we give ourselves a licence to roam the earth in search of golf, we like to think of the good men of the old traditions as being comfortably settled, as being at special places where, in our fireside fancies on winter nights when the winds are moaning and the rains are lashing against the window-panes, we can see them and sit down with them. The wandering hero of tradition does not suit. And here is a great virtue of the people of our golfing traditions: we can catch them tight, nail them fast. We have special plots of land—the majestic links of Scotland, the old course of Blackheath, almost every yard of which might, if speechful, tell a story of some old golfer of the past. The old golfers trod those links some time in their earthly days. We know the shots they played, where balls pitched and how they ran, the bunkers where they had disasters, their amazing recoveries and the putts that they holed and missed—for even the golfers of tradition missed their putts at times. We know where those golfers walked, and so the traditions are of the links and the men with the links, and the links are the same now as once. Let us then hope fervently that they may remain the same, though a hundred kinds of new balls, each farther flying than the one before it, should be invented, and such courses should be declared to be weakened and out of date. It is easy enough to invent a character, but it is not so easy to invent a links and then declare that by sea encroachments on the coast it has been swallowed up and has gone. The tale is weak and unconvincing. But invent your character, and then produce your place, and say: "He was here; his feet were on this teeing ground; here he took a divot; it was in this bunker that he was caught," and there is nothing more that is needed for complete conviction.

Having seen a little of the way in which certain potential and probable traditions of the future are now being made, I have a suspicion about some of the amazing histories of the past that have been reported to us. Such suspicions are developed in the minds of those who have themselves been parties to some exaggerations of things done on certain links, and have lived to see those exaggerations improved upon by further tellers, and of a rich story, with scarcely a base of fact, being thus established in history and made ready for a monument. Having our plots of land, with their permanent marks and milestones, it is easy to do it so, and all golfers cannot be commended for complete veracity, though their lies are tolerably honest of their kind, being, like their shots, made subconsciously, and the cause, being companionable conduct, is a good one. Listeners believe in them and so make them three-parts truth. Cricket and racing have had their splendid men, and they have had certain sorts of places, but nothing homelike, merely round patches of smooth land with rails and grand stands, to which traditions can never cling like ivy to the crumbling tower. The ghost men of these old traditions were fine creatures; well did they do their work; they fought and won; but they seem lonesome creatures. They lack location, and they have no family histories and traditions of their own. They are mere particles of the past. Nearly all the men of our great traditions are heroes of fine countenance and rich character, brilliant in their individuality, with that proper touch of pride and arrogance blended with the finest old conservatism, which all good traditions should enjoy. Only the ancients of the chase are good company for them.

§

It seems to me that our traditions and their associate legends might be separated into five periods. There is the primeval, the prehistoric, the most royal and ancient, the early Scottish, and the late gutty periods. Of the primeval there is no more to be said than there is of primeval man. We know the latter was born, that he did work of sorts, that he ate and slept, that in his way he lived and perhaps he loved, while certainly he died. Of the primeval golfers we are solid in the belief that they had clubs and balls, for they must have had, and they had holes or marks, for they could not have done without them. We suspect them of stymies, for only the weight of tradition has held the stymie to us still, and for its power this tradition must be far extended. Almost certainly they made their first clubs from the branches of trees, but there was nothing grand in that, for Harry Vardon and brother Tom, Edward Ray as well, all three beginning their golf in their native Jersey, did the same, and they played with stone marbles for their balls, played in the moonlight too. There would seem here to have been a tendency towards a throw-back in Jersey golf; but Vardon and his associates have made an ample advance since then. Good Sir Walter Simpson, in his deep researches, leaned to a more exact and defined theory or tradition of the primeval golf, and he gaily marked for it a beginning and a place. It is attractive and it is reasonable, and this, with the theory of the spontaneous and inevitable origin of the game in many places in the early times of man, theories with living detail thickening on them, come near in quality to real tradition. Sir Walter, you may remember, supposed a shepherd minding his sheep, who often chanced upon a round pebble and, having his crook in his hand, he would strike it away. In the ordinary way this led to nothing, but once on a time, "probably," a shepherd feeding his sheep on the links, "which might have been those of St. Andrews," rolled one of these stones into a rabbit scrape, and then he exclaimed, "Marry! I could not do that if I tried!"—a thought, so instinctive is ambition, as Sir Walter says, which nerved him to the attempt. Enter the second shepherd, who watches awhile and says then: "Forsooth, but that is easy!" He takes a crook in his hand, swings violently, and misses. The first shepherd turns away laughing. The two fellows then perceive that this is a serious business, and together they enter the gorse and search for round stones wherewith to play their new game. Sir Walter Simpson was a terrible man, and he must needs work into this excellent romance the declaration that each shepherd, to his surprise, found an old golf ball, every reader knowing that they "are to be found there in considerable quantity even to this day." Then these shepherd-golfers deepened the rabbit scrape so that the balls might not jump out of it, and they set themselves to practising putting. The stronger shepherd happened to be the less skilful, and he found himself getting beaten at this diversion, whereupon he protested that it was a fairer test of skill to play for the hole from a considerable distance. When this was settled it was found that the game was improved. The players, says the theorist, at first called it "putty," because the immediate object was to putt or put the ball into the hole or scrape, but at the longer distance the driving was the chief interest, and therefore the name was changed to "go off" or "golf." In the meantime the sheep, as sheep will do, had strayed, and the shepherds had to go in chase of them. Naturally they found this a very troublesome and annoying interruption, and so they hit upon the great idea of making a circular course of holes which enabled them to play and herd at the same time. By this arrangement there were many holes and they were far apart, and it became necessary to mark their whereabouts, which was easily done by means of a tag of wool from a sheep, fastened to a stick, which, as is remarked, is a sort of flag still used on many Scottish courses in much the same simplicity as by those early shepherds. And Sir Walter wrote with reason that since those early days the essentials of the game have altered but little.

After the time of these first shepherds there were doubtless more shepherds, and the bucolics in general would be given to the game. Yet it should never be understood that even in its origins this game was one that was practised chiefly by persons of low intellectual strength. Indeed it was not. In the ancient classics there are references to ball games that bear close resemblance to primitive golf, and then when games began to appear in Holland and France that had golf in them, even though they were not golf, it was not the common people always who were most attracted. And in passing, it must be said, that while golf as we have it now is British—Scottish, if you like—and there is enough authority and substance in the claim for the satisfaction of any pride seeing that the laws of St. Andrews have been for ages back the laws of the world at large, it is too much to believe that a game so simple in its essentials, so obvious and so necessary and so desirable, should have had an exclusive origin in any one country, to be copied by the others. The elements of golf must have come up spontaneously in many different parts of the world, although they were without rule, organisation, and might not have been known as a game or anything like that by those who employed them. But it was there, as eating and kissing were; and it fell to the lot of those canny and most discerning Scots to regularise it, as it were, to declare it a game and give it definiteness, and in due time to set up laws and a government, all of which were just what they should be and the best conceivable. It might not have been such a good game as it is now had it not been nurtured at St. Andrews, Leith, and Musselburgh, and in those other early cradles of the pastime; but I cannot believe that if there had been no land north of Newcastle there would have been no golf, and we should be moaning now in vague discontent for a mysterious something lost to life.

§

I may adduce some circumstances from most ancient history and tradition which have not been applied to this question hitherto, but should have been, for they seem to be apposite and remarkable. In these days Ireland, with a fine spirit, is struggling for better golfing recognition, and should have it. When a game is for the world, what is the Irish Channel? The country has some very splendid links, and has produced some players—if few of them—of the finest quality; but a people who exhibit frequently a fine appreciation of the spirit of the golfing brotherhood, and to the wandering player extend a hospitality of which it can only be said that it is Irish, are treated coldly in championship dignity being withheld from their courses and their not being admitted to the higher councils of the game. I remember with gratitude a very early acquaintance with the golf of Newcastle in County Down, that glorious course in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains, and with Portrush in the north, while about Dublin there are links that fear no comparison with the best of other lands. The ordinary records may indicate that there was no golf in Ireland until 1881, when what is now the Royal Belfast Club was formed; but listen to a story which is brought to me in some spirit of triumph by a friend, Mr. Victor Collins, a golfer, who practises his game, for the most part, not on any mainland but out on the Arran Isles, west of the Irish coast, out on little Inneshmor, where he lives when he is not in London, and where he has a small course of just a few sporting holes for his own delight, one which would have been as agreeable to the golfers of the prehistoric period as it is now to a modern gentleman who occasionally becomes a little tired of over-civilisation and likes to retreat to simplicity and Nature. It is a considerable change from Stoke Poges to Inneshmor, but only a poor soul would not like it for a period. In London one evening we talked of golf and Inneshmor, and he told me a legendary story, the documentary narrative of which he has since produced in the form of an extract from "O'Looney's unpublished MS. translation of the 'Tain bo' Cuailgne' in the Irish Royal Academy, Dublin." Knowing little of these matters, I quote Mr. Collins direct in saying that this is the most famous of Irish epics, and describes the war Queen Maeve of Connacht, assisted by her vassal kings of the rest of Ireland, waged against Ulster to obtain a bull which was reputed to be a finer animal than the one she herself possessed. The central hero of Ulster was the famous Cuchullain, the greatest of all Irish heroes, in truth an Irish Achilles. Fergus, ex-king of Ulster, who had taken refuge with Maeve, tells her who are the champions against whom her armies will have to contend, and these lines occur in the course of his terrifying account of Cuchullain, whose age at the time of this expedition was between six and seven: "The boy set out then and he took his instruments of pleasure with him; he took his hurly of creduma and his silver ball, and he took his massive Clettini, and he took his playing Bunsach, with its fire-burned top, and he began to shorten his way with them. He would give the ball a stroke of his hurly and drive it a great distance before him; he would cast (? swing) his hurly at it, and would give it a second stroke that would drive it not a shorter distance than the first blow. He would cast his Clettini, and he would hurl his Bunsach, and he would make a wild race after them. He would then take up his hurly, and his ball, and his Clettini, and his Bunsach, and he would cast his Bunsach up in the air on before him, and the end of the Bunsach would not have reached the ground before he would have caught it by the top while still flying, and in this way he went on till he reached the Forad of the plain of Emain where the youths were." This young Cuchullain does appear to have been appreciably better than scratch. Apparently he was going to attend something in the nature of a club gathering, and his way of getting there was much in the nature of cross-country golf with a touch of trick in it; for there are professionals to-day who make a show in their idle moments of pitching up a ball and catching it with their hands. My informer tells me that Cuchullain was not confining his attention to golf alone, but doing feats of jugglery as well in order to while away the journey. "The description of driving the ball before him," he remarks, "evidently contains the germ of golf. Some years ago I saw in an illustrated paper a reproduction of a picture of a tombstone from some place in Ulster dating to the twelfth century. It was the tombstone of a Norseman. On it were a double-headed sword, the sign of his profession, and below it the perfect representation of a cleek and a golf ball, his favourite amusement. It would be interesting to make a serious search in old Irish records for further information on the game. 'Clettini' is from an Irish word for 'feather.' It was evidently a feathered javelin he hurled. 'Creduma' means 'red metal,' that is brass. Hurly of creduma therefore comes curiously near the quite modern brassey. Bunsach is a very obscure word. In middle Irish there was such a word, but it meant a kind of dagger." This discovery opens up an excellent speculation.

§

The periods of the traditions of course impinge upon each other and softly blend, so that the game some way or other seems to go back continuously from now to the beginning. We have in the most royal and ancient period the Stuart kings playing their golf, and Charles the First hearing of mighty troubles to his throne perpending while he was golfing on the links of Leith; of James the Second with his court playing the golf at Blackheath and sowing seeds that were to bear amazing fruit in the south at a far-off date; of Mary Queen of Scots golfing with her favourite Chastelard at St. Andrews. There was Archbishop Hamilton, who signed the authority that was given to the Provost and magistrates of St. Andrews to put rabbits on the links, which authority recognised the rights of the community to the links, more especially for the purpose of playing at "golff, futball, schuteing at all gamis, with all other manner of pastyme." This was a kind of ratification of a Magna Charta of Golf. There was Duncan Forbes, of Culloden, first captain of the Gentlemen Golfers, now known as the Honourable Company, in 1744. A marvellous man was Duncan Forbes, Lord President of the Council, and we know that he played for the Silver Club in 1745—for the last time, probably, because just then the rising of the clans obliged him to set out for the north, where he exerted himself to the utmost to prevent them from joining the cause of the Young Pretender. And here in passing let it be written that there is good cause to think that Bonnie Prince Charlie himself was the first to play real or Scottish golf on the continent of Europe, for he is believed to have had a course made for himself when in Italy, and was once found playing in the Borghese gardens, so Mr. Andrew Lang once told us. There was the wonderful William St. Clair, of Roslin, so much skilled at golf and archery that the common people believed he had a private arrangement with the devil. Sir George Chalmers painted a picture of him, which is possessed by the Honourable Company, and Sir Walter Scott wrote that he was "a man considerably above six feet, with dark grey locks, a form upright, but gracefully so, thin-flanked and broad-shouldered, built, it would seem, for the business of war or the chase, a noble eye, of chastened pride and undoubted authority, and features handsome and striking in their general effect. As schoolboys we crowded to see him perform feats of strength and skill in the old Scottish games of golf and archery." And from there the tale passes on with life and colour to the beginnings of the Royal and Ancient Club; to the activities of the early members like Major Murray Belshes, and the interest of William the Fourth, whose gift medal is played for at St. Andrews to this day; to such fine gentlemen of the old school as the late Lord Moncrieff and the Earl of Wemyss; to the professionals also like the Morrises and Allan Robertson, and old Willie Park. So on along from the ages past to such as Frederick Guthrie Tait, who gave to the modern history of golf something that glows as well as the best of the old traditions.

Now it may be said that these traditions and all the others, like them and unlike, make the game no better, and that they add nothing in yards to our driving from the tee. After a consideration I will not agree either that they make the game no better or that they add nothing to the driving. The spirits of a romantic history are a continual influence. They give a dignity to the game which is felt right through it. Only the golfer knows how true this is. Men who look upon it lightly as a pastime before they know anything of it, learn upon their initiation, and not only learn but feel, that there is all that is mysterious, wonderful, and awe-inspiring in the game and its past, a new and deep respect is created, and there is no more beginner's lightness and nonsense. Age and solemnity, and many ceremonies great and small, have given to golf some of the attributes of a religion, and with membership of it there comes responsibility. When a new Nonconformist chapel has the same exalting influence upon the mind and sentiment of a person of intelligence and sympathies as an ancient cathedral with all its tombs and relics, and the dim pillars among which echoes seem to float and mingle with spirits of the past and the great eternity, or when the dining-room of a flat in Knightsbridge inspires and dignifies its company like the banqueting hall of some ancient castle, I will perhaps agree that the traditions of golf are of no practical effect beyond that of merely preserving the game from vandalism and giving it a place above the others. Often when reflecting thus one feels that in duty to the game one's policy in matters should be "St. Andrews, right or wrong." But yet one could wish that these mighty traditions were not at times invoked for improper purposes. There is too much free and unintelligible talk about them in these modern times. They are wantonly applied to base uses; a man will urge the traditions in his favour and against his opponent when he attempts some vile procedure. When a crafty person is beaten in argument, he cries, "The traditions!" and people who speciously, and with insincerity, condemn what we may call the modern advancements of the game will murmur that the rubber-cored ball and clubs with steel faces are not according to "the traditions." Truly they are not, and those old traditions had nothing to do with gutties either; but Duncan Forbes would have rejoiced in the possession of a modern driver and mashie niblick. It is too often and absurdly assumed that the ancients used the tools they had because they were the best conceivable and most appropriate, just right in practical quality and proper sentiment. They were merely the best that had been discovered up to then. The Stuart kings might have had a happier time had they possessed some rubber Haskells to coax and lead them on.

CHAPTER II

THE UBIQUITY OF THE GAME; WITH AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY OF GOLFERS, AND A NOTE UPON THE EFFECT OF ST. ANDREWS SPIRITS.

The ubiquity of this game—being the third of the seven wonders—is remarkable, for it is played everywhere by everybody. No other sport has ever achieved such universal favour, and we may be sure that none will ever do so, because, apart from the fascination it exercises upon the people of different countries and different races, it is so strong in its simplicity—the stick, the ball, the mark, and, with them being given, the object plainly suggested. It has already been suggested that, in its essentials golf being obvious, it must have been practised from the earliest times. Everywhere the simpler emotions of man are the same, and so everywhere the game must make the same appeal when it is understood. So here, strange as it is still, we have a nearly satisfying explanation. What is yet wonderful beyond it is the fact that the regulated game with the rules and restrictions that have been agreed upon and codified by the high authorities at St. Andrews are everywhere accepted, and even in such embellishments it is the same game everywhere. Nothing can approach it in this universality. Yet that also is nearly explicable.

By a process of continuous thought and deduction from observation the people of St. Andrews, past and present, have gained a code of regulations which seems most completely to satisfy the requirements of the case. It has often been urged against the numerous and lengthy laws we have that they suffer from too many niceties and too many complications, and that they represent a remarkable evolution of man-made intricacy from the one simple governing principle that the ball shall be struck by the stick, and that if the object be not achieved by the first blow it shall be struck again from the place where it then lies. In that simple principle there is all golf, and by it the game must surely have been played at the beginning. But it is the disposition of man to depart from the most absolute simplicity in the direction of what he regards as improvement upon it, and therefore bare principles get covered up with fancy wrappings, while again there is in the human species an immovable distrust of each other and a tendency towards the setting up of safeguards and protections—laws. When this is done in different places, and by different peoples, the results also are almost certain to be widely different; and with the assistance of time and further development two peoples might at length produce two games which, originating in the same basic principle, might be in appearance, materials, and actions quite dissimilar. Nearly all ball games, indeed, must have had much the same original principle. Golf, as we know it, has had its integrity preserved, and has established its amazing universality because, despite the numerous and lengthy laws, the spirit of the game has been so completely preserved in them. Between absolute simplicity, the one natural law of golf, as we might call it, as just enunciated, and a lengthy, confusing, and sometimes even contradictory code there can be little compromise, and perfection and completeness in golfing law are impossible, because no two courses are alike, no two shots are quite the same, and there can be no end to new situations until there is an end of the world and man. It sometimes seems that St. Andrews, indefatigable, pursues an impossible finality, and thereby makes difficulties for itself. That through ages and generations it has produced a code of laws, and defined the principles of a game that is accepted all over the world, and causes the same game to be played wherever the sun may shine, is not merely an achievement in intelligence and discernment, but something that suggests a grand inspiration. These are times of change, when old systems of the world are being abandoned and new ones being set in their places. It may happen, though it is as unlikely as it is undesirable, that St. Andrews itself as a governing body will fall; but nothing that ever happens to the game in the future can equal the marvel of its foundation and establishment by this authority and its associates.

§

It is not without good reason that they call golf the world game now. It has alighted upon every country, and wherever it has touched it has seized. The yellow man likes it; the black man in some places has to be kept away from it, because it is found that he grows too fond of it. One day when I was golfing at the Country Club, near Boston, they showed me a most primitive kind of club that was kept with some other relics in a glass case. It had been fashioned from the branch of a tree, and with this crude implement a nigger boy in one of the southern states had not long previously driven a ball over two hundred yards. Other games are for their own countries, like the country's foods, and they would neither be suitable nor adaptable elsewhere; but in its nature golf will do for all, and it has the same subtle attraction for everybody, so that what was once thought to be the "golf craze" of the British people only became the craze of the Americans too, then of the French, now of the Germans and others, and of really everybody. Its qualities and conveniences make it the only possible world game. At present in some countries it is confined to a few people of unusual distinction or circumstances, but it has been found in old and recent history that, following a beginning of this kind, the game in a new land has never languished, but that presently it has extended from the pioneers, who were probably from abroad, to the native people, and from the upper classes to the middle, and then to the lower. In France at the present time we see the game being started among the general French, and I have news that the statesmen have begun to play; yet a little while since the golf of Gaul was carried on by British only.

Recently some of us were looking over the map of the world for odd countries that might be golfless, and it appeared then that there were but four: one being the Balkan States, considering them in the piece, another was Afghanistan, a third was Persia, and, scattering the attention over the islands of the earth, one reflected that no golf in Iceland had been heard of. But shortly afterwards this brief list of lone golfless places was reduced to one. To a little gathering of friends one night an adventurous gentleman was describing the excitements of a day's rough golf that he had had one time when near to Reykiavik, and, if the course was to some extent made for the occasion, little enough did that matter then. There were some real holes, and the pioneer declared one of them to be the longest and most sporting he had ever played; and we knew he had played some good ones. So Iceland came into the fold. It was discovered during the recent wars that there was golf here and there in those worrying Balkans. Then lo! the land of the Afghans was also delivered to the game, and it was the Ameer himself who was chiefly responsible, thus emulating the rulers of many other lands. He had heard of golf, had seen it, realised it, and had been fascinated. Thereupon he had a short course prepared for him in the neighbourhood of Kabul, and began to practise with royal assiduity at his driving, pitching, and putting. Humble, doubtful, and yet loyal subjects observed this done from a respectful distance, and they wondered. After a little while they perceived that it was a game, and that the chief of Afghans invariably sought with his little ball the holes that were placed upon the course. Being practical people, they conceived that they might turn the game and their royal master's fondness for it to their advantage, and thereupon began to deposit in the holes at night such petitions as they had difficulty in getting placed before the royal eyes by any other means. They believed that by their new system the Ameer was sure to see and read what was intended for him. Yet it proved that he was somewhat angered by this manner of approach, and gave orders that all petitions found in his golfing holes should be burned unread. The petitioning parties had not understood how seriously the game he played was taken, nor the deep effect it had upon the mind and the disposition of the player, else they would surely have moved craftily and warily with their prayers, and then they might have gained imperial favour. Had they seen their ruler miss his drive, foozle his second, put his third into the pond, slice among the trees with his fifth—even Ameers being penalised a stroke for lifting from the water—and eventually reach the putting green in nine, three more strokes then being needed, they would have been stupid Afghans had they not at a convenient moment taken their petitions from the holes, or withheld them if they had not placed them there. But when an Ameer hits a good one from the tee, when his ball flies fast and straight from his royal brassey (and rulers also laugh when a topped ball runs a bunker!), when by enormous luck he lays an approach quite close to the hole, and afterwards the putt is truly played—why, many an Afghan might pray for the release of a brother from prison in Kabul, and the brother, pardoned, might be raised to office in the palace, perhaps to be an executioner. Now, if the petition had been submitted when the sovereign had done his hole in twelve, the brother might have died as arranged, perhaps the petitioner also, and who knows but that the neglectful greenkeeper, for not having seen that all holes for the day were free of pleas, would not have joined the departures for another world. Wandering players may look forward now to some future golf in Afghanistan. Have we not heard of the Shah at the game? If it cannot be proved, Persia must be left in an Asiatic golfless solitude, with the gibe against her that even celestial China has her courses, and that they are everywhere save in the Persia where Omar was, and in fine worldly philosophy bade us take good pleasures while we may.

Golf's vast ubiquity is illustrated in another case recalled by this reference to kings who play. Miss Decima Moore of the theatres has a love for roving far which has led her to many raw places of the earth for hunting and shooting and adventurous exploration when she has tired of the footlights and has longed for Nature with no mask at all. Then, being golfer too, she has wandered with her bag of clubs into many distant lands, and one morning in London, just back from Central Africa, she told me of some strange experiences of a golfing woman. She has played the game up in Uganda, and explained the quality of the play of King Daudi Chwa, who is a ruler of those parts. Even once before, a colonial bishop had informed me of the golf of this dusky king. He had had some holes laid out for himself, so I was instructed, and when not engaged in duties of his kingly office, which were seemingly not onerous, he devoted himself earnestly to the reduction of his handicap and to lowering his record for his private course—upon which strangers in those parts are always welcome to a game. The bishop said that his Majesty drove an excellent ball, played his irons well, and putted with a good instinct for line and length, and the actress backed the bishop's story. In the region of the Victoria Nyanza there are no Sunningdales to be found, but the royal course of nine holes is considered a creditable thing. The king, who was lately in England and played a little here, will be glad to see any golfers who may go that way, and it may be his pleasure to call one of his holes by a name of theirs as, with a good African grace, he called one "Decima" when our English lady played it.

§

These wandering golfers do bring home great stories, and others send them. A friend, poor Tom Browne, who is dead, the clever artist in black and white, sat with me once at lunch in the Adelphi, and we talked of golf in distant lands and many things concerning it, for in the morning he was going eastwards to China and Japan. He said he should play as much as possible, and he did. While at the table he drew a sketch on a piece of paper and passed it to me with a smile. It was a picture of himself leaving on a golfing holiday to those very foreign parts, with numerous bags of clubs, cases of spare clubs guaranteed for all climates, and innumerable large boxes piled up all round him, each one labelled "One gross of best balls." Poor Tom always did take his clubs with him to foreign lands, and on this occasion he made good, as one might say, on that little sketch he drew at lunch by the places he played at afterwards, and queer drawings he sent to me of the courses and the people at them. He wrote from Tien-Tsin that the one they had there was just outside the town and was a flat plain covered with Chinese graves, the course being really nothing but one huge graveyard. "The Chinamen," he said in his letter, "plant their graves anywhere that suits them, and they consist of raised-up mounds which enclose the coffins. Off the graves the ball will bounce at all kinds of angles. Sometimes after heavy rains the mounds fall to pieces and expose the coffins. The golf club can remove any of these graves by buying them at four taels a coffin, and when a grave is bought in this way the native takes the coffin away, buries it somewhere else, and the grave is then flattened down. Fore-caddies are employed on this course. The 'greens' consist of baked mud, as is usual in these eastern parts, and are generally circular in shape. Chinese caddies do not understand the game and think that the foreign devils who play it are surely mad. They continually ask the players, 'When will you finish hitting and following that ball about?' And they have a local rule at Tien-Tsin that 'a ball lying in an open grave may be picked out and dropped without penalty.'"

This graveyard golf, as I know, is not at all peculiar to Tien-Tsin, for not long ago I had a letter from a British official at Chiankiang on the Yangtse River, in which he told me that they had just begun to play the game out there on a course covered with crater-like excrescences, these Chinese graves again, and he declared that they made the most excellent hazards. It should be added for their credit's sake, golfers being considerate people and mindful of others' feelings, that they carefully ascertained in this case that no Chinese sentiment was injured by play in these cemeteries, if they are to be called by such a name. Again, I recall that a little while since the golfers who have a course in the Malay peninsula went down to it one morning and found a Chinaman digging up the remains of a deceased relative from one of the putting greens, intending to remove them to China; because it is a common thing, as I am told, when a Chinaman dies abroad, for his people to inter him temporarily if they can and give him another burial in his native land when opportunity chances. There has been a great move in things in this country lately. The Government has changed; the people, according to some trade returns that I have seen, are taking extensively to smoking English cigarettes and wearing unlovely English clothes. So it is inevitable that in their vast multitudes they will one day come into golf, for a little advancement towards modern ways often leads to strikes and golf. One fears to think that when China has a championship her people may compete in such a costume as is favoured by some of the oldest and best Scottish professionals (and if asked for a name we shall mention good Sandy Herd as a captain of the class), who always wear dark trousers and a light-grey jacket to their golf. There must be some virtue in this unconventional arrangement of tints; for so many of the great are attached to it.

In other parts of Asia there is golf that is peculiar, especially in India where it flourishes to the extent of forty or fifty clubs, including those of Calcutta and Bombay, which are not merely the oldest in India but rank high in seniority among the golf clubs of the world. Both were well established before 1860, at which time there were only two or three in England, and the game was all but unknown in America. Despite the fact that it was born in 1842 and was really an Indian offshoot of the famous Royal Blackheath Club, the Royal Bombay remains a little primitive in the matter of its course. It is a golf course for one part of the day and something else for the remainder, and it is perhaps the only course in the world which is dismantled daily. The fact is that it is situated on what is called the "maidan," an open space near to the European business quarter, and the golfers, having no exclusive possession of it, are not allowed to play after half past ten in the morning and are required, when they have done, to remove their hazards. This obviously necessitates unconventional obstacles, and the club has had to resort to movable screens, varying from four to ten feet high, which are put up when play begins and taken away again when it is finished. Having become accustomed to this sort of thing it ceases to annoy, and in Bombay the course is considered good and sporting, and the greens are well attended. Then up on the hills at Darjeeling there is the highest golf course in the world, for it is situated at an elevation of more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea on the abandoned cantonment of Seneshal. Scenery often does not count for very much with golfers, and the better the golfer the keener he is on the game and the less does he care at times about the surroundings of the course. Yet, as I am told, it would be a dull poor soul that was not moved by the views from the Darjeeling course, with Mounts Everest and Kinchinjunga, both nearly thirty thousand feet high, in one direction and the plains of Bengal in another. But perhaps the most curious of the Indian courses is that of the Royal Western India Club, upon which is an idgah, or kind of temple, some thirty feet in height and fifty long, with bastions at either end and minarets in the middle. This idgah serves the double duty of club-house and a hazard also, for it has to be driven over from the tee on the way to the eleventh hole, and many are the marks on its walls that were made by balls that were hit too low. The course has another peculiarity in that it possesses seventeen holes only, no amount of ingenuity being enough to scheme out an eighteenth on the land available, so one of them has to be played twice over to make up the usual eighteen. This club has its course at Nasik, and mention of the idgah reminds one that the Royal Bangkok Club of Siam used to have an old and very imposing Siamese temple for a club-house. A little while since, when travelling northwards from Marseilles through France, I met, in the restaurant car of my P.L.M. train, an officer just going home on leave from India, and he assured me that he had found no place in the country where there was no golf, and he gave me some good examples of the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the golfers there. Thus at Multam, for the betterment of their sanded putting "browns" they keep them oiled all over, so that the ball runs evenly along them, and at a reasonable pace. There is an attendant to each green, who smooths over the track that is made by every ball when putted. And my companion told me also that in the season at Gulmurg in Kashmir, where they have two courses, there is such a crowd of golfers that it is difficult to arrange starting times for all of them.

As one would expect, the game is played in Japan, and there is a highly flourishing club at Kobe, whose course is on the top of a high mountain at Rokkosan. It is a splendidly interesting course when reached, with views that can only be second in magnificence to those of Darjeeling; but for the occasional visitor the chief pleasure would seem to lie in the reaching, rather, perhaps, than in golfing on it afterwards, for the players have to go by rickshaw to the foot of the Cascade Valley and are then carried up the mountain slope by coolies for an hour and a half, when at last the tees and bunkers come to view.

Thus it is indicated what great work must have been done by the pioneers of golf. They have been fine adventurers and explorers. In their strength of purpose, their resourcefulness, their enterprise and daring, and in their joy of doing beginnings, they have had some of the burning zeal and the quick inspirations of the voyagers of Elizabethan time. They too were discovering a world anew. When a golfer reaches a place afar where there is no course, his first and most natural impulse is to make one. Sir Edgar Vincent, keen player, told me once how he and that most distinguished amateur and ex-champion Mr. J. E. Laidlay, had a considerable hand in the starting of golf in Egypt, where it is now as well established as the Pyramids and Sphinx. Sir Edgar went to Cairo, and with him took his clubs, but on arrival found there was no course whereon to play, and there was Laidlay disappointed in the same way. So they twain obtained shovels and other implements of labour, enlisted the service of native helpers, and went out into the desert, making there the first golf course of Egypt. But theirs was not the distinction of hitting the first golf ball in that ancient land. Long before then a Scottish golfing minister did it. There is no better enthusiast than these ministers, about whom the best stories are told, as of the worthy who was left muttering the Athanasian creed in the lowest depths of hell, being the bunker of that name on the old course at St. Andrews, and the other who felt he would have to give it up because he played so ill and was so much provoked—not give up the game but alas! his ministry. And so the Rev. J. H. Tait, of Aberlady, went for a golfing holiday to Egypt long before the two gallants who did the spade work there, lumbered himself up to the top of the great Pyramid, and then, feeling in his pocket, curiously enough discovered an old golf ball there. To tee it up, to address it with the handle end of his umbrella, and to despatch it earthwards to Egyptian sand with the thwack of an honest east-coast swing, was the labour of no more time than would be needed to recite a verse of Psalms.

A whole book having been written on Australian golf we may leave it unconsidered here. Hardly an island but there is a links upon it. The other day, when I had myself but just come back from foreign golfing parts, I was mated for the game on a London course to one who told me he had only then returned from Fiji, where his last game was at Suva and was a foursome in which the local bishop, the attorney-general, the chief trader, and himself were engaged. He explained the part that was played by mimosa pudica, being the "sensitive plant," in the golf of the Fiji islanders. When this herb is touched by anything, its leaves droop and close upon the object, and, mimosa pudica being all over the fairway of the course, balls would be too often hidden and lost but for the agile caddies who are sent in front to watch for them. In these days one is hearing frequently of travellers' tales like this.

Spain having been captured by the game, as I shall relate in time, there is little need to dwell upon the other conquests of golf in Europe. In Germany it is fast advancing, and the German Golf Association, which publishes a German Golf Year-Book, is an enterprising body. The Kaiser has encouraged the game, and has given land for it. At Baden Baden they have given the most valuable prizes to professionals; at Oberhof, in the Thuringen Forest, there has been made under the guidance of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg one of the nicest courses a German need wish to play upon, and the girl caddies in pretty uniform are the most picturesque alive. In Norway and Sweden, in Denmark, and nearly everywhere there is golf, and much of it. It flourishes in Italy, as is to be shown in a later chapter. Even in Russia you may golf. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow have their clubs and courses, and the Mourino Club, belonging to the former, has its place near a small village some dozen miles from the capital. The golf is good for Russia, but one does not quickly forget the roughness of the road in reaching it. And down at the bottom of that side of the map there is golf at Constantinople too! The game is done on the yok maidan just outside the city, yok being Persian for "arrow," and maidan the word for "plain," the fact being that it was on this land that the sultans and their suites in days gone by were accustomed to practise archery, and there are still on the plain many stone pillars erected to the memory of great shots that were made. The English-speaking colony had some difficulty to gain permission to golf on this ground, and, having no exclusive rights in the matter, are harassed by many worries. It is used largely for drilling soldiers, and is described as being "a favourite resort for Jews on Saturdays, for Greeks on Sundays, and for Turks on Fridays." The golfer may need to delay his stroke while a long string of camels passes through the fairway, and again he may have difficulty in persuading a party of Turkish ladies, closely veiled, taking the sun on one of the putting greens, to retire therefrom for a little while. Yet the game is much enjoyed by the officials of foreign Governments in Constantinople, and the turf on the yok maidan is good.

In the rich remembrances of the game there is little that is mournful; but one sad moment comes when I read a letter reminding me that golf was once played "farthest south," where man does not abide save briefly for exploration and adventure, where there is eternal ice and snow. Captain Robert Scott, the glorious British hero of the Southern Pole, whose friendship I enjoyed, was a golfer too. One of many letters of a personal kind I had from him, just before he set out on his last magnificent but fatal expedition, was addressed from the Littlestone Golf Club. He asked me to send to the ship a certain piece of golfing literature, believing that "members of the expedition would read it with interest and, I hope, with benefit to their handicaps!" He had taken some clubs and balls up there into the Antarctic on his previous expedition, when farthest south was reached. On one of the last days he spent in London I had some talk with him on different matters, and we joked about ways of playing Antarctic shots. We were in his office in Victoria Street then. "Good-bye!" he said in parting, "And you must come to meet me on my return!" And if none met him coming back, yet we know the game he played.

§

The fact that there is golf nearly everywhere on earth will make it appear to some minds, reasonably too, that here is a convenient diversion for those travellers who like this sort of thing, something with which they can fill up time when held up for a while in a distant country and being impatient or weary. True, golf is good for that; but the unsophisticated who imagine that this is the full relation between travel and the game, and that this is the function of the courses everywhere, suffer from a poor delusion, which is expensive.

It is a modern necessity to the traveller. In these days we are a people of wanderers; railways offer cheap journeys, steamships carry us over seas at little cost, hotels are good and comfortable; and why should those who like and have the hours not be always roaming and seeing the open world? But travelling sometimes has its inconveniences and its tedious days. Some wanderers unconsciously exert themselves towards loneliness, and they do not love it when they have it. The joy of meeting with a friend when one is half a globe away from home! With all the travelling that is done in these days there has come a great increase of loneliness. Golf has been set to destroy it. There are still people who travel and do not golf, but they are fewer daily, and as each new travel-golfer is established he wonders how he lived and moved and was moderately well contented and satisfied before. His travelling was a plain occupation then; now it makes more emotion and thrill, and, positively, it is more educative. There was a time, when I was very young, when I did not golf as I travelled abroad, partly because there were few courses to play upon and no golfers to play with, for it is only in recent times that the game has been established in every country in the world; and as I look back upon those days it is hard to realise that they were in this present life. They should have belonged to some other existence, which in the course of time and nature was given up, a reincarnation having followed ages after.

The traveller who is golfless has often no friends at the places that he visits. Some men and women have good capacity for making them at each hotel they stay in; others have not. In any case these acquaintanceships are exceedingly thin; the people do not really know each other; oftentimes they say not what they think, and they have no common interest. This kind of friendship with all its making of artificial conversation is poor stuff at times. The golfless wanderer in his travelling does one of two things; either he does hardly anything at all or he goes to see the sights; and one suspects that much of the peering through the gloom of dark cathedrals and the lounging in picture galleries is done merely for the killing of time, and for the formal recording of places that have been visited and sights that have been seen. Some travellers are happiest when they have done their business with the churches and the local castles and may leave by the next train—one day nearer home and still working well!

The case of the golfing traveller is very different. He has friends in every big town in every country, and all await his coming to make pleasure and happiness for him. He needs to scheme nothing in advance; they are prepared for him always. The automatic management of this real society of friends is most marvellously perfect. The wanderer, let us say, is advancing towards a new place—one that he knows nothing of. From the people about him now he may make inquiry as to which is the golf hotel at his destination, for often there is one to which golfers most resort, and, with his golf directory containing the names of all the golf clubs in the world, and with some particulars and the secretaries' addresses, away he goes complete and well prepared. His corny hands and his bag of clubs are his passport to every links. By the perfect system that we have, every man who is a golfer and a member of a golf club is ipso facto a travelling member of nearly every other golf club in the world, and is admitted to full playing and other privileges without delay on paying the trifling fees of temporary membership, sometimes with even less than that. And one golf club seems very much like another—just a branch of it; the atmosphere is the same, and the men are the same. The stranger reaches his new destination, in England or in India, in France or in America; he registers at his hotel; and as soon as may be he seeks direction from the manager or the hall porter as to the whereabouts of the golf club. There he goes. At once, then, he is admitted to the local community of players, and they make much of him. They arrange games for him, surround him with the most hospitable companions, discover that he and they have many mutual friendships in different parts of the world, and linger upon other common ground in their memories of the third hole at one and the seventeenth at some other place. How the talk goes on! This golfer arrived among the unknown at ten in the morning, and at four in the afternoon he is tied to as many good friends as man could need. They invite him here and there; they take him to their homes; they make much of him. Stranger indeed! A thin voice of a petulant cynic may be heard again. "Yes," says he, "but in travelling one does not wish to spend all one's time in playing games and lounging about golf clubs!" True; and the golfing traveller, though he likes to visit courses in other countries, and finds it well to have an object always and something good with which to fill the daylight hours and keep his health in a well-balanced state, uses the game and its people to greater advantage than even that. The golf community of a place is always the most active and the most useful. There are the local dignitaries, the people of influence and consequence, men who know everything about the town, and can do most things. They can open doors that are locked, and take you to the most secret places. And so the golfing traveller, the first desire for the best of games being satisfied, always finds that his new friends wish to help him. Perhaps the ambassador is here, and ambassadors are serviceable men. All wise people golf a little at the present time. They give their guest letters of introduction; they tell him how to go about. They do much more than that, for they get out their cars and take him. Places which seem unfriendly to others are always friendly to the golfer. There is no particular community, no society, no association, no brotherhood in the world that is so real in its effectiveness, so thoroughly practical as this of golf. A quarter of a million British golfers know that this is true, and they know the reason why.

§

From the consideration of this busy world of golf in general it is an easy move in thought to the one wee spot of it from which it has to a large extent developed, upon which the great scheme continually hangs, being the fourth of our seven wonders of golf—ancient St. Andrews. In a measure I developed this idea at the beginning of the consideration of golf as the world game; but now for a moment regard the capital of golf, not as the parliament place where the high statesmen do ponderously deliberate and with stern visage that befits their lofty authority most solemnly severally and jointly promulgate various laws and ordinances, but as the wonder city of the golfing world where one gathers emotions from a ghostly past, a city where golf is everything and nothing else is anything, where golf is life. This is the aspect of St. Andrews, and the only one, in which it is really great. We have much respect for our rulers. They are wise men, and we believe that they maintain the spirit of the game better than any other body of men could or would. They are well born and trained in golf, and the atmosphere of St. Andrews keeps them straight in the true golfing way. One who lived in an inland manufacturing town or spent his days in the office of a colliery would lose his golfing perspective early in middle age. But these excellents of Fifeshire play a little, read a little, talk much and deliberate, and the social and intellectual atmosphere keeps them strong in their golfing sense always. The government of St. Andrews is really one to respect and have faith in, but it is not the existing wonder of St. Andrews. When you visit the place, such of these rulers as live there do not impress you for anything save their good golf, their excellent and pleasant manners, their keen wit, their fine sense in matters of intellect, their tolerable aestheticism, their shrewd judgment in political affairs, their sound advice on financial questions, their fine epicurean taste, their kingly cellars, their magnificent hospitality, and their charming women. In nothing else that I can think of do they excel, and as minor deities, or as a college of cardinals with a captain for pope, endowed with powers transmitted from a golfers' heaven, they are failures. They are merely human, very good, and excellently conservative.

No sort of people make St. Andrews. Only in two circumstances are the living humans of the place specially interesting. One is on the occasion of the autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club, when the cannon on the hill is fired, when the new captain plays himself in with ceremony, and when all the ancient rites are properly observed until far on in the night. The other is in the attitude of the people generally towards this game as a thing of life, their seeming feeling that it is nearly the beginning and end of all things in this world. This may not be a proper view, and it is for something of the kind, but yet long distant from it, that the golfers of the south are chided and ridiculed for their enthusiasm. That, again, is why the real golfer, heart and soul for the game, who, if he would confess it, does let it take a larger part of his life sometimes than is very good for him (but who knows what this fellow would be doing if not golfing?), feels happy when at St. Andrews, feels that at last he has come to his real home. For here the people look upon him just as merely right and normal because he is a golfer and nothing but a golfer—and a man with a little money to spare. His chief peculiarity is not that he stammers or is deaf or is a total abstainer, that he is a peer of the realm or mayor of his town or a professor of Greek, but that he addresses his ball with the heel of his club or pulls a little always. The place is attuned to his feeling of life; it is in sympathy with him. It is either a fine day for the game—as most days are—or it is no day at all. If we lose our match it does not matter what the papers say of politics or Germany; if we win it, the papers matter less. The caddies know that you are a golfer and what is your handicap; and if you are the real thing that is enough for them. Be not a golfer at heart or a namby-pamby person hanging to the game, and their contempt is rarely hidden. In the hotels they know what golf means to people; the chambermaid on calling you in the morning may tell you the direction the wind is blowing, knowing that it matters more than any hot water. The men in the club-makers' shops are sorely concerned in your domestic difficulties about the length of the shaft of your driver and your quarrel with an iron. They know what it is; they are kindly, worldly-wise doctors, who are the constant recipients of the confidences of poor sufferers. They will try to put you right. All the advertisements on the walls are of golf; the notices in the shop windows are of golf matches and competitions. The streets are called after golf, the taverns have golf names. Yes! golf is in all the air and all the earth and all the people of this ancient city with its far-seen spires.

But yet even these things do not give to St. Andrews its ineffable charm; if they are all that the wanderer notices he is not the real man of the game after all, nor is the splendid quality of the holes on the old course and on the new enough either, great as is that quality. The wanderer missed St. Andrews if these things were all that were discovered. He should understand that here we feel that the Swilcan Burn is greater than the Dardanelles; Asia is a trifle when we survey the vast extent of the fifth putting green, and little enough do we worry of hell when with a fine long shot with the brassey we can carry "the devil's kitchen" on the way to the fourteenth green. Here the game is in the air; we breathe it, feel it. And the reason why is because the spirits are in the air, the spirits of the ancients who at St. Andrews laid the foundations of this game, served for its traditions, set it up and shaped it to the good service of men, and gave their stamp to every inch of this great old course. Do not misunderstand. These men, I do believe, were often very ordinary simple human beings; they may have been no better than we are. There is a possibility that they were worse. They may not have been worthy to be canonised as they have been; but let us not inquire upon these matters, for we should not peer too closely at the gods. What matters is that in the first place undoubtedly they were in at the game before we were, in at it the first of all, were evidently uncommonly shrewd people, and for their discovery of golf and their presentation of it to us their perpetual dignity was well won. It matters also that we have many volumes of good stories about them, and none that is in any serious sense against them. On legend and anecdote they win well. And, third, whatever they were, we believe them to have been these great men, we set them up in our imagination as such, we recreate them to our fancies and desires, and they seem somehow to respond.

So we imagine, believe, and are well satisfied, and therefore the spirits of golf take advantage and seem always to hover in the air of the old grey city, brooding upon the links, contented that things are moving as well as they are, and that what they began prospers so finely, though they wail a little, one would imagine, about what the rubber-cored ball has done, and the wraith of old Allan Robertson turns round to the ghost of the elder Morris, murmuring, "D'ye mind, Tammas, the awfu' trouble that we bodies had wi' ane anither when the gutty ba' kem hither to St. Andrews, and I caught ye, ma servin' man, ye ken, playin' gowff, as ye wad say, wi' Campbell of Saddell and wi' the gutty, and me a maker o' the featheries tae!"

"Aye, I ken weel eno'," croons the shade of Old Tom, "and I'm telling ye, Allan, man, that I was fower up on Mr. Campbell at the eleventh hole, and I was playin' ma very best, and wi' ma second shot at the fourteenth, eh mon alive——"

"Na, na, Tammas, nane o' yer rantin' aboot the shots as ye played at St. Andrews, when ye spent the best pairt o' yer time ower theer at Prestwick, and ye never could mak' up a scoor from a' yer ither scoors as wad come to 56 like mine. Ye ken that, Tom! And dinna forget, ma laddie, as I was goin' to tell ye, that when I saw ye wi' that awfu' new ba' as wad ruin every bit body o' us I tell't ye straight, ma man, as ye must go, and never a bit o' wark did ye do in ma shop again."

And then Tom, good-natured old ghost as he is, and loving his Allan still, just answers, "Puir Allan, ye always were a cunnin' body o' a man, and a guid man tae, and fun aboot ye a' the time!"

And all this about ghosts and the times they have in the air over St. Andrews old links may look like nonsense, but those who do not believe it, or do not feel that they believe it by mental adoption, have not been to St. Andrews properly, and do not understand her.

§

The most utterly non-golfing and sceptical person may be convinced in another way, by matters not of ghosts and fancies but of laws and prisons, that St. Andrews is all golf and is not as other places are. There are laws of the town approved by Act of Parliament, by which it is made illegal to practise putting on the eighteenth green or to play on the course with iron clubs only, the penalty for offences in these matters being a fine or imprisonment. Where else is there a place where a golfer may get fourteen days for depending for all his long shots on his driving iron or his cleek? Clearly, the law is made for the good of the precious turf and the teeing grounds of the old course, and that it is not law made to be looked and laughed at is proved by the fact that a Prime Minister himself was once warned for infringing it. One time when at St. Andrews I made an examination of the complete bye-laws in which these prohibitions are included. They are embraced in the St. Andrews Links Act, which was passed in 1894, and in the Burgh Police Act of Scotland, which was made law two years earlier. The regulations for the use of the old and new golf courses make up these bye-laws, and they are twenty-one in number. Following them are four "general regulations for the whole links as defined by Schedule I. of the Links Act," and at the finish there is a clause about penalties, wherein it is said that "any person who shall contravene any of the foregoing bye-laws shall be liable, on conviction, in a penalty not exceeding one pound for each offence, and, failing payment, to imprisonment for any period not exceeding fourteen days." There it is, the law, and it is that last clause with its sting that gives the point to the whole story.

Now let us look at these bye-laws and see how careful we must be when we go to the great city of golf, and for what we may be fined a pound or lodged in a Fifeshire gaol for a full fortnight, during which our game might go to rack and ruin.

In the first place it is set down that "no person shall play cricket, football, or any game other than golf upon the golf courses." Surely nobody who ever went to St. Andrews would wish to play any other game, but here we have it plainly set forth that the golf of St. Andrews will bear no rivals, and it must be remembered that the great putting green, on which the fifth and thirteenth holes are made, is big enough for several cricket pitches, and also that the large flat space along which a fairway for the first and eighteenth is situated might be made into various football grounds. But what sacrilege! It is well that men may be sent to prison if they ever committed it. Then you may be punished by law if you do not begin your match at the first teeing ground, but no doubt some thousands of people in their time have risked chastisement for this offence. "No player shall, in teeing his ball, raise the turf of the teeing ground." There is sand there for him who wants it, and he must not make his tee in the prehistoric way. After this there are some points of etiquette which are made matters of law. Elsewhere, if we disregard the etiquette of the game as set forth at the end of the rules, we are merely told about it by other people and regarded as very badly-mannered golfers, but at St. Andrews the sovereign or fourteen days needs to be considered. Thus "no player shall play from the tee until the party in front have played their second strokes and are out of range, nor play to the putting green till the party in front have holed out and moved away." And again, "players looking for a lost ball must allow any other match coming up to pass them," and "every caddie, and every player unaccompanied by a caddie, shall replace any turf that may be accidentally removed by the player's club, and shall press it firmly with the foot." Then we may be fined or sent to prison if, when practising, we drive a ball off a putting green, that is, within twenty yards of a hole, and the eighth clause is that which is known to all men—"To prevent destruction of the turf of the golf courses, play or practice with iron clubs alone is prohibited." Also, "no practice is allowed over the first and eighteenth holes of the Old Course, nor shall any practice be allowed over any part of the golf courses so as to obstruct or delay players."

Upon all this, it is enacted that when playing with three or more balls we must allow those who are only playing two, as in an ordinary single match, to pass us on being requested to do so, that we must let a match through if we do not play the whole round but cut in somewhere, that we must not pierce the ground with any golf club support nor with the flags from the holes, nor must we drive towards any person without calling out "Fore!" and waiting until he gets out of range. No man when at St. Andrews is allowed "to play the short game at the regular golf holes, except when engaged in a regular game of golf," and, as said, "no practising is allowed on the eighteenth putting green." There are five other bye-laws, mostly long, but the only other one which is specially interesting is that which is designed to preserve the integrity of the Swilcan Burn, which has played its part so thoroughly and drastically at times of great competitions. No other golf stream is protected by an Act of Parliament in the way that this one is, and its high dignity is unimpeachable. We are warned, under the usual penalty of a fine or imprisonment, that "no one shall wade in the Swilcan Burn, so far as it flows through the Old Course, nor shall any one, except players or caddies in search of their ball, do anything to cause its waters to become discoloured or muddy." There are surely times when we feel that we could not do anything to make the Swilcan Burn appear uglier than it does at those times.

Why a distinction should be made between the "bye-laws" and the "general regulations," four in number, is not quite clear, but it would appear that the penalties of fine and imprisonment may be inflicted if the latter are disobeyed as well as the former. If that is so, we begin to wonder when we see the warning that "no one shall use profane language upon the links to the annoyance of the lieges." Let us then hope, for the sake of the law and our respect for it, that the lieges are not habitually in the neighbourhood of the putting green when putts are being missed that should not be. But it is good to see that there is a kind of general warning that "no one shall annoy or interfere with any one exercising a legitimate use of the links," which means, of course, playing golf. We golfers, according to these bye-laws and the Act of Parliament which supports them, may be sent to prison for doing so many things that it is excellent to know the common people may be cast there also if they meddle with us when we play the game in our own good way, and manage by thought and attention to avoid infringement of the many cautions which the fathers of St. Andrews have prescribed for our welfare and that of their dear old course. The Sheriff of Fife has set it down that he "allows and confirms" these bye-laws, the Secretary of Scotland has officially approved of them, and the staff employed by the Green Committee are authorised to see that they are obeyed, especially those about replacing turf, playing with irons only, and practising at the first and eighteenth holes. Contemplating these enactments, we conclude that St. Andrews is the best and proper place for the upbringing of the golfer's son.

CHAPTER III

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE SHORT PUTT, AND A CONTRAST BETWEEN CHILDREN AND CHAMPIONS, WITH THE VARIED COUNSEL OF THE WISEST MEN.

The case of an earth so well explored by golfing travellers having been considered as the third of the wonders of the sphere, and the peculiarity of St. Andrews as the fourth, there is a clear suggestion as to which is the next or fifth wonder of the series. Inevitably one recalls the tearful situation of the mighty hunter in a story which is passed in company as fact. He declared he had encountered all the manifold perils of the jungle, had tracked the huge elephant to its retreat, and had stood eye to eye with the man-eating tiger. It is believed that he had done all these things. Then he added, "And never once have I trembled until I came to a short putt." For me one of the most remarkable things I have seen in golf was at an Open Championship meeting at St. Andrews when, watching and musing by the side of the eighteenth green, I saw four of the greatest players of this or any other time come up to it in the competition one by one and have putts of less than eighteen inches at that hole. Three of the four missed! In the old days, at all events, when the greens were not quite as they are now, but became very glassy and slippery with much wind and constant play upon them, I believe there were more short putts missed on the old course at St. Andrews than on any other two courses in the world, and the task of holing the little stupids on that home green was a most tormenting ordeal.

So, with the broken-hearted explorer, and the tragedy of St. Andrews, there is pointed to us for the next wonder of the game the missing of the short putt. And I do believe, and so must others, that the missing of such a short putt as it seems humanly impossible for any man, having the control of his limbs and being compos mentis, to miss is one of the most remarkable features of any game, and one that would be completely and absolutely inexplicable did it not in itself offer a most splendid illustration of the full effect of strain of mind on physical action, of the pressure of great responsibility on an over-anxious man. It embraces nearly the whole psychology of golf. The short putt largely explains the game, and it is testimony to the soundness of this view, and the rightful selection of this as a permanent wonder, that the general public would never believe the truth as we know it, that it is possible for the greatest players with what is to them, for the time being, almost as much as their lives depending on it, to miss putts so little that no walking baby properly fed would miss. The general public, with its vast stores of common sense, would not believe the fact; it would ridicule it and treat the whole suggestion with contempt, and it might in a sense be right; but then the general public has not been fighting its way round a golf course against another and very truculent general public, driving, playing seconds and thirds, getting bunkered and recovering, and encountering all manner of difficulties and dangers, and then had its fate for the day depending on a short putt at the eighteenth green! By psychology of the game, as just mentioned, we mean, of course, the way in which the mind and the emotions act and react upon the physical system and its capacity, how doubts and fears are engendered, and things from not seeming what they are become really different, so far as the attitude of the player to them is concerned. Thus, as has been well said, a putt of ten inches on the first green is, as one might feel, a putt of thirty inches—though still in fact of the same length—when that green is not the first but the thirty-seventh, and that on which a long-drawn-out match is being finished.

One summer's day, on a course in France, a little party of us were discussing the slow and sure methods of certain Americans then in Europe—if, really, they were quite so sure as they were slow. Indeed they hustled not. The point was put forward by one of us that there is a moment in waiting when inspiration and confidence come together, or at least come then as well as ever they can or will, and that if the hesitation is prolonged beyond that moment, the result is inevitably loss of faith, increasing doubt and timidity, and a distorted view of the situation arising from fear of fate. Half the difficulties of golf are due to the fact that the player has an abundance of time to think about what he is engaged to do and how it should be done. In that time hopes and fears and many emotions race through his mind, and tasks which were originally simple become every moment harder. In no other game has the player such ample leisure in which to think, to be careful, to be exact, and to decide upon the proper action, and thus responsibility is heaped upon him for what he does as it is in no other sport or recreation. He is oppressed with a mighty burden. That which he does he is entirely responsible for, and it can never be undone. It follows that this game has an extensive and peculiar psychology such as is possessed by no other. I shall proceed to tell a little story, dramatic in its circumstances, abounding in significance. It embraces the meanings and mysteries of golf.

§

The strange case of Sir Archibald Strand is one that caused much excited attention among the members of the golf community in general some months ago, and it is still discussed in the club-houses. Sir Archibald Strand, Bart., is a fair example of the thorough, enthusiastic, middle-aged player, who treats golf as something rather more than a game, which is as it should be. He is one of tolerably equable temperament, a good sportsman, and a man of strong character and physique, who did a long term of military service in India. Nowadays he spends an appreciable portion of his time in golfing, and a fair part of the remainder in contemplating the enduring mysteries and problems of the links. The game worries him exceedingly, occasionally it leads him to unhappiness, but, on the whole, he feels he likes it. He is a member of several London clubs, including Sunningdale, Walton Heath, Mid-Surrey, Coombe Hill, and Woking, and of his seaside clubs those he most frequents are the Royal St. George's at Sandwich, and Rye. His handicap is 5, and generally he is what we consider and call a good reliable 5.

He and his opponent, to whom, as a matter of discretion and confidence, we must refer as Mr. A., had just ended their match at Mid-Surrey one pleasant day, and Sir Archibald was trying his last putt over again as golfers often do. It was a putt of two feet. He had missed it before; but now, of course, he rolled the ball in every time. A question arose about circumstances altering cases, as they so commonly do in golf, and of responsibility weighing heavily on the mind that hesitates; and Sir Archibald declared that nobody in good health could be such a fool as to miss a two-feet putt like that, if he really examined the line thoroughly, and took the proper pains. Just then the open champion of the period was passing by the green, and they called him up and asked his views upon the missing of two-feet putts. Taylor denied that a man was a fool for missing them. He mentioned the psychology of the business, and very forcibly argued that a two-feet putt was a very difficult thing, that the more important it was the more difficult it became, and that the longer one thought about it the more impossible did it seem to hole it. "Ah!" said he, with the solemn countenance he assumes when discussing the terrors of this game, and the deep emphasis he makes when he admits the difficulties it creates for him, "Ah!" he murmured, "if I had never missed any putts of one foot, let alone the putts of two! I tell you, sir, the two-feet putt, when it has to be done—mind you when it has got to be done—is one of the most difficult things in the world to do, and never mind the fact that your babies can do it all the time! Take that from me, sir!" This was a touch of the real Taylor, the true philosopher, one who knows the game.

Mr. A., who is sometimes aggressive in manner, brought the matter in discussion to a pretty point at once. "Look here, Strand," said he, "I will tell you what I will do. I will place this ball here, so, exactly two feet from the hole, and I will give you a fortnight, but not less than a fortnight, to hole that putt. You are not to practise it here at this hole on this green in the meantime; but you may place the ball in position if you like, and look at it. And a fortnight to-day, at ten o'clock in the morning, you must make the putt, and I will bet you fourteen guineas, being a guinea a day for waiting, that you do not hole it. We will have the position of the hole properly marked, so that a fortnight hence it shall be in the same place."

The champion said he would tell Lees, the greenkeeper, and that should be done. Strand, with a laugh, accepted the wager, and the matter was settled.

The events that followed were curious. In the club-house there was then little disposition to attend to the accounts of the proceedings that were furnished by both parties. The men who had finished rounds were too much occupied with their own troubles or joys.

At his club in town that evening, Sir Archibald, over dinner, related the circumstances of the wager to a few friends, with an appearance of considerable satisfaction with himself, and seemed a little surprised that the other members of the party did not at once approve of his proceeding as sound and businesslike.

"Of course, you know, Strand, my good man," said Mr. Ezekiel Martin, a successful stockbroker, "these putts are missed sometimes, and I don't suppose it makes it any easier for you by waiting a fortnight. It's like carrying over in the House till one is a very tired bull."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Sir Archibald, "I could go out now and hole that putt nineteen times out of twenty in the dark!"

"I believe you could," answered Martin, "but doing it in the dark, when you cannot see the hole and realise all the imaginary difficulties, is very different from doing it in broad daylight; and putting now, on the spur of the moment, as it were, is very different from putting when you have a whole fortnight to think about what you are going to do."

"I don't see it," replied Sir Archibald, yet he began to feel a little uneasy. On returning home that night, instead of going to bed at once he went into his study, laid a tumbler on its side on the carpet, and putted from a measured two feet for about half an hour. He holed most of them, and tumbled into bed feeling that Martin had been "pulling his leg," as people say. In the morning he engaged a gardener to smooth down a piece of his lawn, planting in a little putting-green turf, and he had a hole made in it, and a circle with two feet radius drawn round the hole, so that he could putt from every point. When this work was done, he spent an hour in practising there, and succeeded well. He only missed about one in ten. He tried seven different putters, with approximately equal results. In the afternoon he went down to Mid-Surrey, played a match, and lost it by missing a short putt at the home hole. After tea, he went out on to the eighteenth green, found the spot where the hole was the day before, examined it carefully, and saw that there were slight differences in the texture of the grass round about, and that there was a little depression to the left side. He had not noticed this before. However, said he to himself, it would be easy to make allowances for these things, but he began now to doubt whether thirteen days ahead he would use his wry-necked putting cleek or bolt the putt with an aluminium putter. Where there are troubles of that kind it is often better to make short work of the putt by the bolting way, and have an end of it. At home that evening he did more putting practice on the carpet, and did not hole them quite so well. Lady Strand, who understands her husband thoroughly, and is the sweetest, gentlest sympathiser, coaxed him to telling her the trouble, for she saw that one existed. With perfect wisdom she suggested that he should wipe the fourteen guineas from the current account as already lost, and face the task as one who had all to gain and nothing to lose. Of course, her husband said, it was not the money, but the frightful jackass he would look if he missed the putt.

He went to his club in town the next day instead of going to golf, and took with him a book containing a chapter on putting, by Willie Park. He stretched himself out on a Chesterfield in a corner of the library, and gazed at two spots on the carpet which he had measured as being two feet from each other. Eventually, he decided that that was not good for him, since equal distances in furnished rooms, as is well known, look longer than they look outside. He lunched with a few friends, and brought up the subject again.

"Give him the money and have done with it, Strand. You are sure to lose!" said the brutish Martin.

"I wish I had not to wait for a fortnight," murmured Strand.

"Ah! He knew! The other man knew!" rejoined Martin. "He knows the game of golf! What I cannot understand is why he did not give you a year and make it 365 guineas. You would have sold out in six weeks at £200!"

Sir Archibald wrote a letter to Mr. A. that evening, intimating that he would probably have to leave town the week after the next. He hinted that it might be convenient if they got their wager out of the way beforehand, and if he putted a week from then. Mr. A. replied that he was sorry it would not be convenient for him to attend then, and that the signed terms of the contract had better be abided by.

Sir Archibald bought two new putters on the following day, and in the afternoon he had Taylor out for an hour, and they went practising on the putting lawn just outside the garden gate. Sir Archibald was putting very well then; but he insisted that it would be a good thing to change the ball he was using, which was rather lively. After he had done with Taylor, he went to look at the place on the eighteenth green where he would have to putt, and it seemed that the coarse grass had fattened up considerably with the rain that had fallen, and that the sand below it was distinctly gritty. It began to seem that he would have to run the ball in at the right side of the hole. He asked Lees some questions about the grasses on that green, and was sorry he could not take a little Mid-Surrey turf home with him. He was feeling a little tired when he reached his home that night, and as it was Thursday he suggested to Lady Strand that they should go to Folkestone for the week-end, and not bother at all about golf, which they did accordingly. He found it delightful to linger on the leas and not be worried with the game.

This kind of thing continued and became worse and worse again during the days that followed. There was practice, thought, and purchase continually, and unfortunately the proportion of missed putts at two feet, both on the carpet, on the practice lawn, and on the greens at Mid-Surrey, Coombe Hill, and Woking, began to increase. At putts of three feet, four, and five, Sir Archibald was marvellous, and, of course, he never missed the very little ones; but the two-feet putts bothered him all the time. He attributed it to his liver; and he was certainly looking worn. Matters were not improved by such inconsiderate remarks as were made by Martin, Evans, and others, whenever he had a two-feet putt to do, such as "Now, Strand, that's just your distance!" It was only a joke; but in the circumstances it was not perhaps in good taste.

On the evening of the twelfth day Strand, after deliberation, wrote a letter to A. in which he said he feared he would not be able to go down to the course at the appointed time, and intimated that, according to the terms of the wager, he would hand over the fourteen guineas to him when next they met. Before posting this letter he went and did a little practice in the dusk on the lawn outside the house. He seemed to get them down with some confidence on this occasion, and Lady S., watching him, called out cheerily, "Silly boy! as if you could really miss! Now what shall I buy with the fourteen guineas?"

So Strand tore up the letter and went to bed for rest.

On the night before the appointed day he slept badly. He was putting in his mind until three o'clock in the morning. Then he rose, went in his pyjamas into the study, made a line on the top of his aluminium putter indicating the striking point, and went back to bed, but did not sleep. For some time he tried an imaginary humming of the "Jewel Song" from Faust, and repeated a few lines from Scott's "Lady of the Lake"—old dodges of his for assisting distraction and sleep—but they did not serve, nor did a fixed vision of millions of balls falling in an endless stream from the mouth of a pump and disappearing instantly through a golf hole in the ground.

At five-thirty he rose again and took his bath. He hesitated as to what golfing suit he should wear. Finally, for the sake of complete ease, and that there should be nothing to attract his eye from the ball, he put on some dark-blue flannels.

He looked at his breakfast, pecked at a sole, and at nine-fifteen, feeling distinctly unwell, he took a taxi for the course. He had one great consolation upholding him. At five minutes past ten it would all be over. He felt that he knew how glad a condemned criminal must be that at five minutes past eight on a certain morning—or a minute or two earlier with a little luck—a black flag would be hoisted on the prison pole.

At seven minutes to ten he drank a large brandy and soda and went out to the eighteenth green. Mr. A. and a few others were there to see the business properly carried out. Taylor placed the ball exactly two feet from the hole, which was cut in the proper place. He had his watch in his hand.

Sir Archibald bent down and examined the putt with great care. He essayed to pick up what seemed to be a "loose impediment" on his line, but saw that it was not loose. The putt seemed very difficult now, and he wished he had brought his plain putting cleek out with him, but it was too late.

At ten o'clock exactly, Taylor said, "Now, Sir Archibald, will you kindly putt?"

Sir Archibald Strand looked like a man who had been hunted down. He made one swift glance around him, but saw no escape, so he pulled himself together, smiled a little sadly, and said to himself, "Don't be a fool, Archie!" Then he faced the putter to the ball; the club was trembling slightly. He swung it back much too far, checked it in the return swing, and came on to the ball in a nervous, stupid sort of way, doing little more than touch it. The ball took a line to the right of the hole, and did not run more than fourteen inches.

You may have thought that Sir Archibald used unfortunate words and was dismayed. He did not. A look of established happiness and placid contentment spread upon his countenance, as a streak of sunlight might flash across a plain. "Ha!" he sighed in relief. He took from his pocket a cheque for fourteen guineas already made out, and handed it to Mr. A., and then joyfully exclaimed: "Thank heaven, it is finished! Now, my friends, we will honour this unusual occasion in a suitable manner at your convenience, and this afternoon I leave for Sandwich for a week of golf. And no letters are being forwarded."

§

Let us now enter consideration of this matter in a proper frame of mind, seriously and not looking contemptuously upon the problem of holing even the very shortest of putts as no problem at all after the affected manner of the inexperienced and uninformed general public. Let us approach it cautiously and in an analytical spirit. We should take the evidence of expert witnesses upon happenings in their careers, in our endeavour to discover the real truth. We have already remarked upon the case of the hunter who shot tigers and cringed at putts, and of the great champions who all missed them on the eighteenth green at St. Andrews, when they were playing for nothing less than the championship. We have also contemplated the circumstances of the distressed baronet who was given a fortnight in which to hole a two-feet putt, suffered intolerable agonies during the period, and was only restored to happiness when he had failed at the stroke. Now let us pay regard to the experience of a little child only six years old, who was completely successful at many putts in succession, at distances of from one to six feet, all the most perilous situations. This remarkable demonstration was witnessed by the proud parents, by a great professional, and by myself.

The child is a boy, and not, as has been stated, a winsome little girl. There is, if I may say it without offence, nothing remarkable about his parents. They are excellent kindly-mannered people, of tolerable middle-class education, simple in their manner of life, and of no pronounced tastes in any direction. The father is in a large timber business in the Midlands, and has probably an income of about six hundred pounds a year. His handicap is 14. He is not a very keen golfer, and seems to spend a fair amount of his time in his garden. A total abstainer, he smokes little, and has no strong tastes in art and literature; but he once told me that in addition to much Scott and a sufficiency of Dickens he had read one of my books on golf. That is the father. As to the mother, she is just one who might be called in the north a nice little body. She is a thoroughly good housewife, domesticated, affectionate, and if she does not play golf she sympathises with it. These are people who are tolerably satisfied with their state. They live in a pleasant house, employ two maidservants, and have no motor-car. Here, surely, is nothing to suggest the creation of genius. Yet they are the parents of this remarkable child who did, with no hesitation, with confidence, certainty, and frequency, what the mighty hunter, the champions, the bold but misguided baronet, and you and I have failed to accomplish.

There is a man of wit and wisdom, Andrew Kirkaldy, who, when you inquire of him what is the most difficult thing in golf, responds with no hesitation that it is to hole "a wee bit divvle of a putt that long!" and so saying he will hold his hands four feet apart. Occasionally he may vary the phraseology, not to its advantage, but the meaning and effect remain the same. Andrew is solid on four feet. But authorities differ a little in this matter of measurement. Some will reduce the distance to thirty inches; others have it that the yard putt is the most trying; I have heard eighteen inches put forward. But it all amounts to much the same thing, that what looks ridiculously easy is very, very difficult. Now this tender little child, who knew nothing of the fears and dangers of this awful game, placed the ball at a distance of two feet from the hole on a curly and slippery green, and with a sublime aplomb hit it straight to the middle of the hole—the first putt of his life and a good one. Then he putted from a yard and holed it again, then from Kirkaldy's distance and played the stroke just as surely and successfully, and then repeated them many times, never faltering, never failing. We who watched were a trifle sad, and perhaps ashamed. We knew that with all our thought and skill and golfing learning, all our strength and manhood, we could not do the same when at our games, and that, the more we needed to do it by the importance of the golf that was being played, the more difficult it was. Our selfish consolation was that in time the little child would grow up and then he would not be able to hole those putts, for then he would know that it was a difficult thing to do, and would be embarrassed and defeated accordingly. For it is the golfer's consciousness of imaginary difficulties that makes him such a strange coward when this putting business is being done. He knows that really the putting is easy, but he knows also that he must not miss, that an inch lost here is as much of a loss as two hundred yards in the driving—and he fears his fate. It is consciousness of the stupidity of missing, nerves, fears, imagination, that make this missing of short putts by the cleverest players, champions as much as any others, the most remarkable thing that happens constantly in any game. There is nothing like it. If it were not so easy, if there were good excuse for failure, those putts would not be missed so frequently. In putting, said Sir Walter Simpson, there is much to think about and much more not to be thought of. "When a putter," he reflected, "is waiting his turn to hole out a putt of one or two feet in length, on which the match hangs at the last hole, it is of vital importance that he think of nothing. At this supreme moment he ought studiously to fill his mind with vacancy. He must not even allow himself the consolations of religion. He must not prepare himself to accept the gloomy face of his partner and the derisive delight of his adversaries with Christian resignation should he miss. He must not think that it is a putt he would not dream of missing at the beginning of the match, or, worse still, that he missed one like it in the middle. He ought to wait, calm and stupid, till it is his turn to play, wave back the inevitable boy who is sure to be standing behind his arm, and putt as I have told him how—neither with undue haste nor with exaggerated care. When the ball is down, and the putter handed to the caddy, it is not well to say, 'I couldn't have missed it.' Silence is best. The pallid cheek and trembling lip belie such braggadocio."

§

The truth is that the man who golfs will unceasingly think of the things he should not think of, and that is what makes this easy putting so difficult, and it explains why the innocent child, unthinking, finds the business as simple and pleasant as swinging under the boughs of a tree on a sunny day in June. While there is one quite easy way of doing nearly every putt, there are perhaps a dozen more or less difficult ways of missing it, and it is these that are uppermost in the golfer's mind when the time of his trial comes, and so once more is vice triumphant while angels are depressed. There is the hole, a pit that is deep and wide, four and a quarter inches in diameter, and there is the little ball, only an inch and a half through the middle, and the intervening space between the two is smooth and even. It would seem to be the easiest thing in theory and practice to knock the ball into the large hole; but how very small does the hole then appear to be and how much too big for it is the ball! But the golfer knows that he should hole that putt, and that if he fails he will never, never have the chance again. Should he putt and miss the act is irrevocable; the stroke and the hole, or the half of it, are lost, and nothing that can happen afterwards can remove that loss. Should he at the beginning of the play to a hole make a faulty drive, or should his approach play be very inaccurate, he knows that he may atone for these mistakes by special cleverness displayed in subsequent strokes, and with the buoyant hope that constantly characterises him he thinks he will. But the hope seems often to desert him at the end; confidence lapses. The short putt is the very last stroke in the play to that hole, and if it is missed there is no further opportunity for recovery. In this way it does seem sometimes that there is a little of the awful, the eternal, the infinite about that putt. The player is stricken with fear and awe. He knows it is an easy thing to do in the one proper way of doing it, but raging through his mind are hideous pictures of a dozen ways of missing. Once upon a time I put the question to a number of the greatest players of the age as to what were their thoughts, if any, when they came to making one of these little putts on which championships or other great affairs almost entirely depended, and almost invariably their answer was that at the last supreme moment a thought came into their minds and was expressed to themselves in these words: "What a fool I shall look if I miss this putt!" Those words exactly did Willie Park, the younger, say quietly to himself just as he was about to make the last short putt of a round at Musselburgh, which would or would not give him a tie for the championship with Andrew Kirkaldy. He did not say that if he missed the putt he would lose the championship. He said he would look a fool.

The other day in a quiet corner of London, away from the game but, as it happened, not from the thought of it, I had Harry Vardon with me engaged in some serious talk in a broad and general way upon golfing men and things. Ten years ago, when we were doing some kind of collaboration in the production of a new book, he said to me very impressively and as one who wonders exceedingly, "It is a funny game; let us impress that upon them all, it is a very funny game," and now, having played perhaps five thousand more rounds and won another Open Championship, he went forward to the admission, "It is an awful game." He meant it, and one reason why we like our Harry Vardon is because he too has always been awe-stricken by this so-called game, and because there is no other man in golf who sympathises better with the trials and tortures of the moderate player. On this morning of spring he was telling me of another new and great discovery he had made in putting methods, and in giving to me an account of his pains, his sufferings in missing all the short putts he had failed at in recent times—how dearly have they cost him!—he said it was the two-feet putt that frightened him most of all, and declared solemnly and seriously that he would rather have a three-yarder than such a putt, and that he would hole the former oftener than the latter. He said the two-feet putts frighten him, that as soon as he settles himself down to the business of putting in such a case the hole seems to become less and less. "I am overcome," says he, "with the idea that in a moment it will be gone altogether. Then I am in a state of panic, and I snatch at my putter and hit the ball quickly so that with a little luck it may reach the hole before it goes away altogether and there is nothing to putt at. When I have missed I see that the hole is there, and as big as ever or bigger!" Vardon once tried putting left-handed, a doctor having advised him to do so, and he found that the idea worked splendidly, but he did not like the look of it. He believes after all his sorrows that one of the greatest and best secrets of good putting is to keep more absolutely still than do most golfers, who seem to think it matters less in putting when it matters so much more.

§

Now the golfer in his wisdom, ingenuity, and resource has tried every way he can think of to solve this problem of nerves and doubts by mechanical and other means. Those who would be successful in competitions have retired to bed at nine o'clock in the evening for a month, and some of them have sipped from bottles of tonics hoping that physic would serve to give them strong nerve, steady hands and courage, but such methods have not availed. For no part of this or any other game have so many different kinds of instruments been invented, though the little child could do the putts with the head of a walking-stick or a common poker. Scarcely a week goes by in the season but some new kind of putter is introduced to the expectant multitude of harassed players, and now and then a thrill runs through the world as they receive a clear assurance that at last some special device has been discovered which will make their putting ever afterwards easy and certain. There is a thrill as if a secret of long life had been found. But the chill of disappointment follows quickly. Golfers have now tried all things known, and more short putts are missed than ever. Hundreds of different kinds of putters have been invented. They have been made with very thin blades, and with thick slabs of metal or other substance instead of mere blades. They have been made like spades, like knives, like hammers, and like croquet mallets. They have even been made like putters. They have been made of wood, iron, aluminium, brass, gun-metal, silver, bone, and glass. Here in my room I have the sad gift of the creator of a forlorn and foolish hope. It is a so-called putter made in the shape of a roller on ball bearings which is meant to be wheeled along the green up to the ball. Like some others it was illegal according to the rules. To such extravagances of fancy the desperate golfers have been led in their desire to succeed in this putting that the authorities have had to step in for the defence of the dignity of the game to declare a limit to the scope of invention in this matter. And yet I once knew a man who for a long period did some of the best putting that you would ever fear to play against with a little block of wood that had once served to keep the door of his study ajar, to which had been attached a stick that was made from a broom handle. This improvised putter was a freak of his fancy at a time when he thought there might be some virtue in a return to prime simplicity. Then Mr. James Robb, who has won the Amateur Championship once and been in the final on two other occasions, has putted all his life with a cleek that his sister won in a penny raffle when he was a boy and gave to him. Likewise Mr. John Laidlay has also putted uninterruptedly since he was a boy with a cleek that is now so thin with much cleaning that his friends tell him he may soon be able to shave himself with it. But these are the grand exceptions after all. Such fine settlement and constancy are unknown to the average player. It was but the other day that I learned that a friend of mine, one most distinguished in the game and of the very highest skill, had used fifteen different putters on the day of an important competition—three in the morning's play, nine others in noonday practice, and three quite fresh ones in the afternoon game. The same good man carried a choice assortment of his own putters to a recent amateur championship meeting, but at the beginning of the tournament made love to one of mine, borrowed it, and used it until he was beaten—not a long way from the end of the competition. Sometimes it seems that what is rudest in design, almost savage, is now best liked when in our frenzy we have ransacked art, science, and all imagination in search of the putter with which we can putt as we would. There is the spirit of reaction; we would return to the primitive. Putters that look as if they might be for dolls, some of those stumpy little things made of iron on a miniature aluminium-putter model, which some of the great champions have been using, have hardly become popular. The crude and the bizarre, suggestive of inspiration, please well. I shall not forget Jean Gassiat, good golfer of France, coming up to me one championship day at Hoylake, holding forward in his right hand, and with its head in the air, what was evidently meant for a golf club, but which was as much unlike one as anything we had ever seen. On the face of the player was spread the grin of pleasure; wordlessly he suggested that at last he had found it, the strangest, the most wonderful. In principle this new club, as it has to be called for courtesy, is akin to the affair of the door-stopper and the broomstick. It consists of a plain flat rectangular piece of wood about four inches long, two inches wide, and three-quarters of an inch deep, and its two-inch nose is cut quite square, while for a couple of inches at the end of the shaft the grip is thickened to twice its usual size. It is weighted and balanced by large and small lead bullets in the sole. It is possible to frame a good argument in favour of a putter made of anything; nothing is without some advantage. It could be said for a ginger-beer bottle that it would insist on the ball being most truly hit from the middle of the vessel as the ball ought to be hit, and, given notice, one could prepare a statement of claim on behalf of an old boot seeking to be raised to the putterage. So there are good things to be said for this putter from France, and one of the best is that after smiling upon it Jean Gassiat began to wonder, then thought, experimented, and fell in love with this putter completely. Some weeks later I saw him doing those marvels on the green as are only done when man and putter have become thoroughly joined together, and Gassiat has always to be taken seriously in these matters, for, like Massy, he is a Basque, and, like the old champion, he is one of the most beautiful putters, with an instinct for holing. This most remarkable invention, without desiring its extinction in the least, one would say, surely departs a whole world of fancy farther from the traditional idea of what a golf club should be than the poor Schenectady of the Americans which St. Andrews proscribed. It was not the idea of Gassiat, nor of any other than the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, a French sportsman of thoroughness and a very keen golfer. Seeing what Gassiat was doing, James Sherlock obtained one of these barbaric tools, and at this the public came in.

§

Every thinkable variety of putting method has been adopted. Bodies, hands, feet have been placed in all positions, and the stroke has been made in every conceivable way. Are there any two players who do it just the same, or have the same advice to give? For a violent contrast take two of the most able amateurs of the time, both of them long since distinguished in the foremost competitions, Mr. John Low and Mr. H. S. Colt. The former favours the wooden putter, and he has one of that kind to which he is keenly attached, but he putts with all sorts of things as the spirit moves him on consideration of special circumstances. He was one of the early members of the thoughtful school of golf which has made such a strong advance in recent times. Nearly always, however, you will find him standing nearly upright when doing his putting, grasping a club with a tolerably long shaft somewhere quite near to the top of the handle. This erect attitude is that which our fore-fathers of the traditions mostly favoured. Those splendid gentlemen, as we have agreed, were fine golfers who conducted their game nobly, but it has always seemed to me that they were an unimaginative lot. It never appears to have occurred to them that because the club has a handle at the top was no reason why they should grasp it up there instead of nearly at the opposite end, as do a large body of the most enterprising and inquiring amateurs these days. Of this advanced party the eminent architect is a shining example, for he holds his putting cleek so far down, so near to the ironwork, that the shaft seems useless, and in addition to this he defies all teaching in putting by planting the heel of the club down on the green and holding the hands so low that the toe of the putter is cocked up, and with this toe he hits the ball, and, as it looks, he tops it. But that putting of his is too much for most of the men who have to play against it. When those who do not understand see men putting in this way, or something like it, they say to themselves, and perhaps to others, that they cannot see why the men do not have the unused part of the shaft cut off so that it may not be in the way. But there they show their deficiencies of knowledge, though one is not sure that all the men who putt with a low grip quite know why they do so. They only know that the method suits them, but the truth is often that in these cases the balancing piece of the shaft above the hands acts as a steadier for the piece below. A few students have carried this idea a point further by having a piece of lead attached to the top of the handle to increase the weight and the balancing influence of that part. Mr. Hammond Chambers is one of them. The amateurs are the most original and peculiar in their putting methods. For the most part the professionals, although adopting widely different stances, hold themselves fairly well up when doing their work on the green, and putt with an easy following-through stroke as is recommended by the old masters. Strange that we should realise that quite the most impressive, stylish, and beautiful putter of the erect school is M'Dermott, the brilliant young American champion, who stands straight up with his legs and heels touching, grips his putter at the very end, and moving nothing but his club and hands, makes the most delightfully smooth swing. The low-grip method is not at all conducive to the gentle swinging, following-through putt, but encourages a sharp little tap.

All the old original philosophy and instruction in putting can be summarised in a very few words, but hundreds of thousands would be needed for discussion of the variations, most of which have been used successfully at some time. The majority of advisers make a point of it that the ball must be hit truly, but they would not all be agreed on what that "truly" was except that it was hitting it as they meant to do. What most of them have in mind is that there is on the face of the putter a proper hitting point, from which the ball will run more accurately and with less disposition to slide off the right line than when hit with any other part, that being the point of balance or the sweet spot which every iron club possesses, and this point should be brought to the ball by an even swing from the back, and the swing should be continued after impact by the steady smooth advance of the head of the club along the line that it was making at the moment of striking. Absolute steadiness of the body is quite essential, and lack of it—just the most trifling and almost undiscernible lack—is responsible for more putting failures than almost any other cause. Most of those who tell us what to do in golf advise that we should keep the arms and forearms quite still also, and putt entirely from the wrist. And yet even these canons, as they are considered, are defied by large bodies of players. There are thousands of golfers who putt from the toes of their clubs, and believe in the method. They say they can feel the ball better and direct it more surely.

I quote again one of the first preceptors, Sir Walter Simpson, because I think in most matters of feeling and practice he stands so well for the old solid school of golf that has nearly died away. He insists on the wooden putter, to begin with, and maintains that no good thing upon the green can come out of iron, but therein he was mistaken and time has cried him down. And then he writes: "I have just said there are, at most, two or three attitudes in which good putting is possible. We are nowadays inclined to be more dogmatic, and to assert that there is but one. The player must stand open, half facing the hole, the weight on the right leg, the right arm close to the side, the ball nearly opposite the right foot. To putt standing square, the arms reached out, is as difficult as to write without laying a finger on the desk." Had he lived on to these more modern days he would not have been nearly so dogmatic as that. Some of the very best putters do not play with the open stance, but putt entirely from the left leg, that leg thrown forward and in front and bearing all the weight, the right being merely hanging on behind. Then they have the ball right opposite the left toe, and they putt with a sense of strain which they believe in such circumstances is conducive to delicacy. Tens of thousands of others could not putt in this way, but those who can are very successful, and this is just another indication of the danger of dogma in golf. As to the right arm at the side, it may be said that there is now a fast increasing practice on the part of those who bend down somewhat to their putting to rest the right elbow or forearm on the right knee. J. H. Taylor experimented with this idea on the very eve of the 1913 championship at Hoylake, his putting for some time having been bad. He adopted it, won the championship, and gave the new way of putting all the credit.

Now see how high and deeply thinking authorities can differ about the ways and means of doing this thing that the little child does so thoroughly and well. "A great secret of steady putting is to make a point of always 'sclaffing' along the ground," said the baronet. "The best putters do this, although it is not evident to an onlooker, the noise of the scrape being inaudible. To be sure of the exact spot on the putter face which is invariably to come in contact with the ball, is, of course, essential to the acquirement of accuracy. If you play to hit clean, your putter must pass above the ground at varying heights, as it is impossible to note how much air there is between it and the turf. In the other way you feel your road. But the greatest gain from treating putting as a sclaffing process is the less delicate manipulation required when short putts are in question. At a foot and a half from the hole the clean putter often fails, from incapacity to graduate inches of weakness, whilst the sclaffer succeeds because he is dealing with coarser weight sensitiveness."

Now time and experience have showed us all that we cannot be dogmatic about anything in golf except that the ball must be struck somehow, and least of all may we venture to dogmatise in the matter of putting, and we will only say now that the late Sir Walter has a heavy majority against him on this suggestion that in doing the short putts it is well to let the putter scrape along the grass when going forward to the ball. It seems a small matter (that little man child never thought of it, but I noticed he did not sclaff), yet a whole world of good and ill upon the links is bound up with it. We shall set this happy golfer as he was, and friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, against one of the great champions and one of the finest putters who have ever handled clubs, and that is Willie Park, the younger, who says, "One of the secrets of putting is to hit the ball, and the ball only—a sclaffy style of putting is fatal; and, with the object of making absolutely certain of avoiding it, rather aim to strike the globe just the least thing above the ground. The ball should be smartly tapped with the putter, the stroke being played entirely from the wrists; and it should be neither struck a slow, heavy blow, nor shoved, nor should it be jerked."

Most golfers will be with Willie in this matter, and those who have not tried already that way of putting, the sole of the club being kept clear from the turf when the stroke is being made, might do so to their very likely advantage. It is a point that a player of limited experience might never think about, and I know many who have been converted from bad putters to good ones by it. Some of the leading players of the Hoylake school have long been addicted to a slight elaboration or variation of this method. As they bring the club on to the ball they lift it slightly so that at the moment of impact a peculiar running spin is given to the ball, one that is not quite the same thing as is imparted by merely topping it. The way appears to help the hole to gather the ball when it arrives, but it is a method that needs natural aptitude and much practice to make it quite safe in application. And then again, right away to the contrary, I have witnessed in recent weeks a way of putting by one or two of the best players in the country, which is new, and which they declare to be most effective when dealing with the small heavy balls that are now in vogue and which are so difficult to manage, especially on very keen greens. We have all heard of the push shot, generally done with cleeks and the more powerful irons—and many of us have tried to play it as Harry Vardon does, and the things that I have seen done and described as push shots by ordinary amateurs have been very dreadful. But, no matter; the idea of the push shot is to hit the ball a kind of downward glancing blow, the club coming to ground after impact, the result being that the ball starts off quickly and pulls up suddenly. The players to whom I have referred have applied this stroke to their putting, coming on to the ball above the centre and gently pushing the club through it, and in the circumstances I have indicated there can be no doubt they have succeeded. Balls being so tricky now, these matters are worth considering.

You would perceive how boldly dogmatic was the writer of the early classic on the question of stance. On that point there is just one more word to say. The tendency seems to be increasing in these days towards holding the feet closely together. It is a stance to which Harry Vardon, after all his putting troubles, has nearly settled down, and many of the best men on the green, Tom Ball for one, are given to it. But there is no law, no recommendation even, only the most timid suggestion to be made to any man in this matter. That way which suits him and gives him confidence is the best, and one may find men putting marvellously well when their stance and attitude seem to be so ungainly and difficult as to cause them pain.

§

The method of holding the club has, at least, as much to do with good putting as anything else, and in this matter one may almost dare to dogmatise. The majority of players hold their putters with the two hands close together but detached from each other, in much the same way as they hold their other clubs. All of them have heard of what they call the Vardon grip, or the overlapping grip, by which, when the club is held, the left thumb is brought into the palm of the right hand, and the little finger of that right hand is made generally to ride upon the first of the left hand. Many try this grip for their long shots, but few persist with it, as they become convinced either that their hands and fingers are not strong enough for it, or that before they could master the method they would need to suffer too much in loss of the game that they already possess. Therefore they renounce the overlapping grip entirely. But if they would try it in putting they would experience none of the difficulties with which they are troubled when applying it to their wooden club shots, no sort of force having to be given to the stroke, and almost from the first attempt they would enjoy an advantage. It is a matter of the most vital importance in putting that the two hands should not interfere with each other to the very slightest extent. One of them should have the general management of the putting, and the other, if detached from it, should do little save act in a very subordinate capacity as a steadying influence. Everybody is agreed upon that; it is absolute. But when we have the two hands separate, as with the ordinary grip, there is always a danger of the subordinate asserting itself too much, or at all events varying in the amount of work that it does. It cannot be avoided; it is inevitable. This, we may be sure, is the cause of much bad and uncertain putting.

Join the two hands together, as with the overlapping grip, and we have them working as one completely, and the risk of undue interference by the subordinate vanishes. This is the best hint on putting that all our counsellors have to give, and they one and all declare it will do more than anything else to raise a man to the high level of excellence of the innocent child. Sometimes we see men putting one-handed, and one may believe that for medium and short putts this way is more certain than the separate hands. Mr. Hilton once putted that way in the Amateur International match, and I have seen many other good putters do well with it. But it savours of freakishness, and, as a famous professional said to the distinguished player who adopted the method, "God did not give us two hands for one to be kept in a pocket while the putting was being done." The simple truth is that the one-hand way approximates very closely to the two-hand overlapping method. It is nearly the same thing, the same principle—all the work being done from one point. Upon thought, we often come to realise that what appear to be some of the most freakish methods of putting have the same fundamental principle at their base. Thus, take the case of Sherlock, who putts extremely well and consistently. He almost alone, among players of the game, holds his two hands wide apart on the handle of the putter, the left one uppermost, of course. This looks very strange, and at the first consideration it might seem that surely one hand will upset all the good work and reckoning that is done by the other. But the simple fact is that the left is so far away that it cannot interfere, and that is the secret of the quality of this method. When the left is close up to the right we cannot prevent it from meddling; we are unconscious of it when it is doing so; but get it far away and we have it in subjection, and all that it does in Sherlock's case is just to steady things up a little while the right hand does the business of the time.

Mr. Walter Travis, the most eminent American, than whose putting in the Amateur Championship he won at Sandwich nothing better has ever been seen since time and the game began, long since adopted a slight variation of this overlapping grip, specially for his putting, which, I think, has something to commend it. Instead of letting the little finger of the right hand rest on the forefinger of the left, he reverses the situation, and puts the forefinger of the left hand on the little one of the right, thus leaving the right hand in full possession of the grip, both thumbs being down the shaft. In the other way it is the left hand that has hold of the club with all its fingers, and it will now be remembered that while the left hand is the chief worker in driving and playing through the green, the right is the one that most frequently does the putting.

Having thus mentioned Mr. Travis, one can hardly refrain from quoting some of his instruction in this matter as he once conveyed it to me. "I believe," said he, "that putting should always be done with one hand—with one hand actively at work, that is. The left should be used only for the purpose of swinging the club backwards preparatory to making the stroke. When it has done that its work is ended and the right hand should then be sole master of the situation, the left being merely kept in attachment to it for steadying purposes. When only one hand is thus employed the gain in accuracy is very great. Two hands at work on a short putt or a long one tend to distraction. When the stroke is being made the grip of the right hand should be firm, but not tight, and after the impact the club-head should be allowed to pass clean through with an easy following stroke. The follow-through should indeed be as long as it is possible to make it comfortably, and, with this object in view, at the moment of touching the ball the grip of the fingers of the left hand should be considerably relaxed, so that the right hand may go on doing its work without interruption. Never hit or jerk the ball as so many players do. There is nothing that pays so well as the easy follow-through stroke."

Yet we find that there is less than ever of that easy follow-through being done in these days, and putting may be no better for the fact, almost certainly is not. These are days when old maxims are being abandoned and new systems are being proclaimed season by season. Jack White, a splendid putter and a magnificent heretic, lately declared that it is time to get rid of what has been regarded as the most inviolable of maxims, "Never up, never in," asserting that the determination to be past the hole in putting, if not in it, leads with these lively balls we now play with to far too many of them running out of holing distance on the other side. His counsel, therefore, is that the ball should be coaxed gently up to the hole with as much drag applied to it as can be. Then for years past it has been recommended that one of the best ways of managing the putting with these speedy balls is to have much loft on the putter, and so in that way do something to create the drag; but lately a change of opinion began to be made, and I am finding some of the best players using putters that are perfectly straight in the face, believing that by their agency they can putt more delicately and with a surer judgment of strength.

It is a little bewildering. Arnaud Massy, the French player who once won the Open Championship, and who is better at the putts of from six to ten or twelve feet than any man I know, says that he has come to believe that Nature has planted deep down in us a sixth sense, and it is that of putting. In the development of that sense lies the way to success. But after all such meditations as this, I go back to the remembrance of that wonderful little child who could never miss, and then from it all there emerges the only real secret of success in putting. The child has a quality which we elders do not enjoy, and never shall have it for any length of time. He knows not the hardness of the world. Having innocence and faith he looks trustingly upon it, and the old world and its four and a quarter inch hole is a little ashamed, perhaps. The child has Confidence.

CHAPTER IV

OLD CHAMPIONS AND NEW, AND SOME DIFFERENCES IN ACHIEVEMENT, WITH A SUGGESTION THAT GOLF IS A CRUEL GAME.

If men who play games are not proud of their champions, of what then shall they be proud? If we advance the proposition—which is done here and now—that no other game or sport that was ever conceived and played has produced such remarkable strength and mastery in its champions as golf has done, the cynics will find that with the resources of the world and history at their disposal this position of ours can be well maintained, even though we have less than sixty years of championships for our support. And let it be said also at the beginning that we of golf declare to win, not with the Morrises or Parks, as might be supposed—good men they were too—but with the moderns, and especially with our Harry Vardon, our Taylor, our Braid, and the amateurs, John Ball, Harold Hilton, and the Frederick Guthrie Tait of immortal and beloved memory. I have long since grown accustomed to the mysterious and the inexplicable in golf, and pass them by on their fresh occurrences in these days as like the commonplace, something for which indeed there may be some explanation and a simple one, but one which the gods, with their humour and their teasing, are hiding from us. We who in this game have fed so long on wonders are now disposed to overlook phenomena. We tire of sensations and the extraordinary, and would revert to a smooth placidity of plain occurrence. It is in such mood that we often contemplate the records of the past, and then we dismiss them quickly with the comfortable judgment that the Morrises were themselves, and, being fixed on a permanent pinnacle, must not be disturbed. They have become a creed. One might imagine little plaster figures of old Tom, his left hand in his trousers pocket, thumb outside, and young Tom in Glengarry bonnet all complete, to have been placed in some over-zealous golfers' homes along with representations of Homer, Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Gladstone, and Cecil Rhodes, and no questions are to be asked about them. It may be right to place them there, those early champions of the game, but when sometimes steeled to sacrilege and careless of all risk, I set myself to analyse the conditions and circumstances in which they gained their immortal glory, I can give reasons, ordinary worldly reasons, why they gained it; and can thereupon pass them as satisfying every reasonable requirement of human champions of the first degree. But with the others it is not at all like that. Golf being the game it is, the repeated successes of those three great players we call the "triumvirate," Taylor, Vardon, and Braid, at a time when competition is so enormously severe, and when—this point being of towering importance—the luck of the game, always considerable, is, through a variety of circumstances, greater than ever, appear to me, having seen most of them accomplished, and now looking upon the plain printed records of indisputable fact, to have still some elements of impossibility. One has a fear that three or four hundred years from now the golfers of the period may not believe that these things did happen; they may decide that we of this imaginative and progressive age, a little fearful perhaps of greater wonders that might be accomplished in the future, had prepared a little trick for posterity and had set forth false records of what we had done, so absurd that their falsity was self-evident, and so we were to be pitied for our simplicity. In our humble way, and by stating the records of achievement in the coldest way, admitting moreover that even to us of the time they appear incredible, we do our best to gain favour and acceptance with our descendants. Fifteen Open Championships to the triumvirate, and eight Amateur Championships to Mr. John Ball himself. It is indeed impossible; but it is one of those things in golf that are to be described in the terms that Ben Sayers (who might have been given a championship by the fates for services rendered and skill displayed before the era to which he chiefly belonged was closed, as men are made lords when governments give up) applied to the victory over him by Fred Tait on his own course at North Berwick once by something like seven and six—"It's no possible, but it's a fact!" All of us know one man—perhaps more than one, but we do know one for certain—who nearly all the time that Mr. Ball has been winning those championships might have been winning them himself, has been almost good enough to do so. But he has won nothing, and after all it may not be a matter of much surprise if we consider the enormous odds against victory in a championship because of the luck of the game, the fact that it is not like running or rowing, billiards or chess, where strength and stamina, knowledge and skill, work out almost exactly every time, but a game in which skill has this element of luck blended so largely with it. But Mr. Ball, Amateur Champion eight times over, and the triumvirate as well!—when "the truth stands out as gross as black from white," with my eyes I can scarcely see it. These persons have forbidden the caprice of chance that was set to worry them, they have overthrown the laws of averages, they have annihilated the weaknesses of flesh and blood, and they have laughed at fortune and at fate which, defeated, have joined up with them. Then clearly they, with the collection of champions in general for their garnishment, are to be regarded as the sixth wonder of the game.

It is now too late—as it always was too late—to make any fair comparison between the great players of our own time and those who were members in the early years of the Open Championship. There is not so much argument now as to whether Harry Vardon is better than young Tom Morris was, though such argument was common only ten or a dozen years ago. How may you compare these men? Young Tommy won four championships in succession, but there was only a handful of competitors each time, and the opposition was feeble almost to nothing in comparison with what it became a very few years later. Vardon, Taylor, and Braid have each won the championship five times, and many of these victories were gained against their own fellow-champions and the strongest opposition conceivable. Yet though such as Vardon produce what are in a sense more astonishing results in the way of scores, we are reminded that they have far smoother courses to play upon and much improved clubs and balls. Also they have better rivals to sharpen their game. From this one might argue that it would be strange indeed if they were not better than young Tommy was, that it is quite inevitable they should be. But our modern champions have done more than fulfil the obligations laid upon them. They have established an amazing supremacy at a period when golfers are reckoned in the hundreds of thousands; young Tom was champion when there were the hundreds without the thousands. His championship, at all events, did not mean so much. The championships gained by our triumvirate are proof beyond all possibility of doubt or question that these men are the most exalted geniuses, that they have such a clear superiority over all other golfers of their time as is, seeing the circumstances of the case and knowing the waywardness of golf, almost incredible. The success of the younger Morris proved, as some will hold, only that he was quite the best golfer of a few eligible to compete for the championship.

§

After all, if comparison is fruitless and not properly practicable, this speculation as to the merits of the geniuses of nearly fifty years ago and now becomes enticing. One would like to reach some conclusion upon it, but cannot. It would be fine material for a golfers' debating society. Were I to regard myself as advocate for the moderns I should in an agreeable and inoffensive way suggest that time has done nothing to hurt the fame of young Tommy's skill. When what they call the golf boom began and the great game percolated through the mass of ignorant English, there was babble all at once about St. Andrews, and men of southern towns just discovering that the right hand on the driver should be the lower one whispered of the ancient city in a hypocritical manner of respect and awe as if it were high up above the blue instead of a day's journey up the northern lines from Euston or King's Cross. The name of the place was taken in vain, and to this day there are neophytes who lisp of "the Mecca of golf," as they say it, and its eleventh and seventeenth holes, though they have never been in Fifeshire and maybe never will. At the same time and by the same people there was established the vogue of young Tommy Morris, as one might call it. It was nearly sacrilege in the circumstances, for more people were living then than are living now who had known young Tommy, and fervently believed he was the best golfer who ever played the game. But what we may call the Morrisian traditions were established in this way, and they have laid a shoddy veneer on the really sound reputation of the young champion that it never needed. So the proposition is advanced that through ignorance and affectation and carelessness we posterity are being abundantly generous to young Tom and his father—forgetting Allan Robertson, such is the effect of championships, who was before them, and of whom it was said when he died that they might toll their bells and shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest was gone. We posterity are of another golfing world completely from that in which those early champions of St. Andrews lived and golfed. I have here in my room a driver with which old Tom played, and I see that the other day some rash fellows, unafraid of ghosts, took out from their receptacles some clubs which had belonged to him and others and played a game with them. But the handling of the old clubs and the looking on the picture of Tom which he once signed for me cannot bring the feeling of his time to ours, and I pass it on as a suggestion to our own posterity that our judgment in this matter, as it has been made, is nearly worthless.

It has been coldly stated that lies are told by golfers. That allegation may be dismissed with no consideration, but it is certain that fancy traditions of flimsy origin gather about golfing history and soon establish themselves in the most remarkable manner. I know many incidents of the past ten or fifteen years, things I myself have witnessed, the truth of which has become completely obscured by masses of imagined stuff that has gathered on them. To take a good example, more than half the golfers in the world will tell you that Lieutenant Fred Tait won a championship at Prestwick after wading into water at the Alps to play a shot from there in the final; if they will look at the records they will find that splendid Tait did not win that championship at all, and they should be told that the shot that Mr. Ball made from the wet sand in that same bunker was nearly as difficult and, in the circumstances, more trying. Again, the victory gained by Mr. Travis at Sandwich, so recently as 1904, is now already described in many different ways, but one feature common to all of them is that the American holed a putt of twenty yards on nearly every green, that his driving was childlike in its shortness, and that he was smoking himself to death at the time. Still later, the very next year, there was an Amateur Championship at Prestwick, and I remember that Mr. Robert Maxwell, after a hard struggle against young Barry—who won the championship—had to loft over a stymie on the eighteenth green to keep the match alive, and then at the nineteenth the student was left with a short putt to win that hole and the match. I saw the play in that match and saw the putt, and I believe it was one of about a couple of feet. It was certainly too much to give in the circumstances, far too much, but Mr. Maxwell, great lover of golf as he is, had even by that time begun to tire of the strenuousness and the officialdom and the graspingness of championship tournaments, and he waved his club in token of presentation of the putt to his young opponent and generously shook hands with him. The Scottish spectators did not like it at the time, because "oor Bobbie" was their best and greatest hope, and it seemed like feeding the devil with chocolates to give putts like this to English golfers. By the time that we had returned to the club-house, only three hundred yards away, it was being said that that putt was three feet long, by the morning it had gone up to three feet six, and increasing gradually it even touched the five-feet mark within the next few years. At that point there was a reaction and, from what I can gather, the putt has settled down in history at four feet. It was half as long.

So I think that golf posterities are fickle bodies, and even the best of them are not nearly so responsible and accurate in their judgments as is believed by those people who trustingly say that they will await the verdict of posterity. I remember that M. Anatole France urged that posterity was not infallible, because he himself and all human beings are posterity in regard to a long succession of works with which they are imperfectly acquainted, and he quotes the case of Macbeth whose reputation posterity has murdered, though Macbeth himself did no crime at all. Macbeth was really an excellent king. He enriched Scotland by favouring her commerce and industry. The chronicler depicts him as a pacific prince, the king of the towns, the friend of the citizens. The clans hated him because he administered justice well. He assassinated nobody. And as M. France remarks, we know what legend and genius have made of his memory. It is that way reversed with all our golfing traditions, and so we must handle them carefully. It is a principle of this game that no man can be a good golfer and a bad man, that those who are bad at heart have not the human qualities necessary for being golfers at all, cannot associate happily with the rest of the community, and so they get themselves properly out of it betimes. Hence it happens that of no golfer is there anything that is bad to be told. We have no Macbeths in this sport of ours, though it embraces some pensive Hamlets, and a number of the moderns would be golfing Romeos if their swings were finished in the old free style. But if tradition had indeed given us a foul Macbeth who improved his lie we should surely purify the remembrance of him, believing that his immediate posterity had almost certainly judged him wrong.

This case which the advocate has set up against young Tom, with all this blame cast on posterity, will seem a weak thing yet to some. If we were counsel for the boy, who made a fine and a lovable figure in his day, should we bandy with words like that, or put evidence direct and plain before the tribunal, the evidence of those who saw? There are still a few of them left, and for myself I should not have far to send to gain a willing witness. I have a good and valued friend, Mr. Charles Chambers of Edinburgh, member of a distinguished golfing family of many generations, and a fine player himself, who was in the semi-final of the first Amateur Championship. He saw young Tommy at the game, and played it with him. And Mr. Chambers, once answering my plea for some of his remembrances, said, "As a youngster at St. Andrews, I was a great friend of young Tom, the champion, and on a summer evening often accompanied him alone, when, with a club and a cleek, he played out as far as the second hole. He was, I believe, the greatest golfer the world has ever seen, those giants of the present day not excepted. His driving, which I remember so well, was of the long, low, wind-cheating style so seldom seen now, with great distance and carry. He never struck a ball anywhere except on the centre of the club, and this was reflected in the faces of his driving-clubs, which had a clear and distinct impression in the centre, the wood above and below being clean and fresh as when last filed. His putting was perhaps even more deadly, and in ordinary matches I recollect he was seldom or never asked to hole out a yard putt. In driving from the tee, his style may be described as an absolutely correct circular sweep, with great accuracy and follow-through, and this applied equally to his iron play. It was his custom to wear a broad Glengarry bonnet, which very frequently left his head on the delivery of the stroke.... Without doubt he succumbed to his private sorrows and a broken heart." That is strong testimony, and the abiding conviction is that young Morris was great indeed, but in the nature of things comparisons cannot well be made between then and now, and are better left undone.

§

I am glad that we have thus condemned posterity, for we strengthen the positions of our triumvirate and Mr. Ball at their only point of weakness, which is that their successes have been so marvellous as to be incredible to those heirs of ours who, not being of this period, will not have witnessed them. Posterity may suggest that such persons could not have lived, since none of us will hesitate to say that such posterity will not itself produce a man to win three championships. Even to win one twice is to make a proof of superiority such as in existing circumstances seems nearly impossible. Any man, as one might say, may win a championship; that would prove nothing save that he is as good a golfer as any other, or nearly so; but to win two championships is to prove that he is appreciably better than the others, that he is so much better as to balance with his skill the chances of the game—the putts he missed and the long ones that his opponents holed—that were flung against him. During a period of nearly twenty years the success of Taylor, Vardon, and Braid has been so complete, so overwhelming, so dazzling, that among them they seem almost to have solved the problem of perpetual victory. Each of these men is a genius, a great master of the game; each of them, had he lived in an age apart from the others, would alone have been enough to make a separate era in competitive golf; and it is a strange freak of fate that they should have been pitchforked into the arena at the same time. It is as if three Ormondes had been in the same Derby, or three Graces at the crease, when at their best; indeed, it is more wonderful than those things would have been. They were born within thirteen months of each other; Vardon and Braid within three months. The last-named is the eldest of the group; he was born at Earlsferry, in Fifeshire, on 6th February 1870; Harry Vardon was born in Jersey on 7th May 1870; and Taylor was born at Northam, in Devonshire, within a mile of where Mr. Ball won his eighth championship, on 19th March 1871. They are of different race; for Braid is a pure Scot, Taylor is pure English, and Vardon, while, of course, we are proud to regard him as belonging to us, is really half-French and half-English. They are of different build, different temperament, and of very different style in golf; but there they are. Among them they have won the Open Championship fifteen times, and when one of them has succeeded it has generally happened that the other two have been his most dangerous rivals. There must be a limit to the period of success as there is to human life, and for years people have murmured that these three are not like the little brook that purls down the hill, and they cannot go on for ever. And yet at the beginning of each new championship an instinct settles in the public mind that they cannot be beaten. Considering what the Open Championship is, what a fearful strain it exerts on temperament, mind, body, and muscle, how a single slip may mean failure, and then how many really magnificent golfers are in the lists, some of them old champions themselves, this is a strange state of things. I recall that when a championship was played at Muirfield in 1906 the sceptics were then loud in their prophecies that a "new man" would arise, and that the triumvirate would be cast down. And then? James Braid was first, John Henry Taylor was second, and Harry Vardon was third, though a hundred and eighty other players had done their best to beat them! Taylor, the Englishman, although the youngest of the three, was the first to score success. He and Vardon both made their initial appearances in the Open Championship at Prestwick in 1893, and on that occasion the 75 that Taylor did in his first round stood as the lowest made in the competition, although he did not win. At his second and third attempts in the championship he took first place each time, and on the second of these occasions an Englishman's victory was at last accomplished at St. Andrews, the Scottish headquarters of the game. He won there again in 1900, and is the only Englishman who has ever won the Open Championship on this hallowed piece of golfing ground. A year after the others began, James Braid entered the lists, and very quickly then did these three establish their triple supremacy. An injured hand kept Braid out of the great event in 1895, but since then each of the men has played in every championship, and among them have won fifteen times out of twenty-one. At the "coming of age" of the triumvirate in 1913, when it was twenty-one years after Taylor and Vardon started in the event, Taylor, the first to score in it, won his fifth and became "all square" with his friends. That was a remarkable occurrence. Since 1894, when Taylor won his first championship, there have only been five years when one or other of the triumvirate has not won the cup. In 1897 Mr. Hilton got it; in 1902 Sandy Herd, playing with the rubber-cored ball on its introduction, scored; in 1904 Jack White was the winner, both Braid and Taylor having a putt to tie with him on the last green; in 1907 Massy, the Frenchman, triumphed; and in 1912 the hope of Edward Ray was realised. And in each of these years one of the triumvirate was second.

§

But if each of the triumvirate is a phenomenon and collectively they are super-phenomena, in what terms then are we to describe Mr. John Ball, and how shall we account for his eight amazing championships? Mr. Harold Hilton, as all the world understands very well, is a great master of the game, a magnificent golfer who knows it through and through, and a tremendous fighting man. There has hardly been anything in all golf's history so splendid as his coming again and winning two more Amateur Championships when he had seemed almost done for ever, and very nearly winning an Open Championship as well. But if after considering the professionals at their stroke game, we are now to think of the amateurs in their match-play championship, it is John Ball who is the wonder man. The luck of the game that was emphasised in the consideration of score play is surely greater in the match. At all events, the professionals themselves to a man declare that the score play makes the better test, and therefore is the fairer. If that is so, there is, inferentially, more luck to be conquered by a good man in the amateur event, and Mr. Ball has eight times beaten his fields and beaten all the luck against him. Twenty-four years after winning his first Amateur Championship at Prestwick he wins his eighth at Westward Ho! and, for all the great players that the game has yielded, no other man has gained more than half those wins, and only Hilton has done that. Surely it is a mystery very profound as to how he has won so often. And yet it is less of mystery if we accept the proposition that he who plays golf for the sake of golf and fears not to be beaten is the most dangerous of opponents. Mr. Ball's early championships were won by his own skill and his perfect temperament; undoubtedly some of the later ones, which through increasing numbers of opponents have or should have been harder to win, have been gained because he cared little whether he won or not, and because his opponents feared to lose, and feared the more as they felt their impending fate when they had the master of Hoylake laid against them. To a little extent they have beaten themselves, and Mr. Ball has done all the rest. Has there been more than one of his championships in recent times that he has keenly desired to win, that being the one he gained at St. Andrews in 1907, because he wished to be victor at the headquarters where he lost long years before, after a tie with Mr. Balfour Melville? At eight o'clock on the morning after he won his seventh at Hoylake I saw him in the garden at the back of his house giving his chickens their morning meal. It was as if nothing had happened. How many other men would have been feeding chickens so early in the morning after winning an Amateur Championship? Has he finished winning, I wonder? There is a cause to suggest that he has not. He won for his seventh the only championship ever played in Devonshire, and he has won the event on all the regular amateur championship courses on which it is played but one, and that is Muirfield, which has been something of a bête noire among courses so far as he is concerned. Once there he suffered one of the biggest defeats of his career, in the international match, and then in the championship he went down in a surprising way to a youngster of Dornoch. Shall he not add Muirfield to his list?

Despite a certain beauty of his style and the ease and elegance with which he plays the game, Mr. Ball's golf is strongly individual to himself. There are many pronounced mannerisms in it, and they are of a kind that if any one tried to copy them, he might find his game being injured rather than improved. They are the ways of the genius who cares nothing for convention. Few can drive a better ball. At the outset of his career he was a long driver. His first big match away from his native Hoylake was one against Douglas Rolland. It was a home-and-home affair in England and Scotland, and Rolland was greatly celebrated in those days for the length he gained with wooden clubs. Yet he outdrove Mr. Ball but little in that engagement. He obtains his length not to a large extent from run, as most men get it now, but by a ball that starts on a beautiful line, makes a very long carry, and leaves it at that, with a little pull to finish with. It has seemed that he has had more control over his wooden club play than almost any amateur except another of fame who was bred in the same great school. An outstanding peculiarity of his method is the way in which he grips his club, which is done not in the fingers and lightly as by other men, but by a good firm grip in the palms of his hands with the fingers facing up. He makes small use of the thumb and the first two fingers of his right hand. His stance is an open one. His play with his iron clubs again is unconventional. Even for his shortest shots he swings his clubs, meaning that he makes less of a jerky hit at the ball than others do, and he resorts less to cutting the stroke than other great men. But what a master of judging of heights and distance he is! To see him just plop the ball over a bunker in the way and then watch it run the necessary distance afterwards is to understand what marvellous properties of control can be invested in such perfect human golfing machinery. Another of his peculiarities is that he carries no niblick in his bag, and I think he never has carried one. He has certainly not had one in any of his recent championships. And among many other of his characteristics is that peculiar gait with the bent knees that, because of their climbing over the hilly links, golf seems to develop in men (Harry Vardon has it), his extreme modesty in manner, and the splendid excellence of his sportsmanship. Some one once set forward a curious theory that children born in the winter-time are likely to become better golfers than others; their temperaments are supposed to be favourably affected by the prevailing rigour of the weather conditions! It is, anyhow, a curious fact that a very large proportion of our best players were born in mid-winter months, and of them all John Ball is the greatest, and he, if you please, was born on a day so far removed from midsummer as Christmas Eve.

§

There has been lately a sort of revival of the game of attempting to punch another man so very hard that he can stand up no longer to make the smallest punch in answer. He has to be battered and pounded until he is made practically lifeless for a period of ten seconds, and then the other man is given the money. This is what we call the "noble art of self-defence," but, obviously, it is nine parts of such defence to reduce the other man to such a jellified condition that no more defence is needed. When well played it is a good game. Now golf never has been called a "noble" game at all. It is "royal" and it is "ancient," and it leaves its qualities to speak for themselves, as most eloquently they do. The boast has indeed been made for golf that, while in so many other English sports something flying or running has to be killed or injured, golf never calls for a drop of blood from any living creature. It is then inferred that it is a gentle game, as in some ways it really is. Also it has been demonstrated that it is a game at which elderly men may play and play quite well, as was proved in a recent year when golfers who are becoming older than they like to think of won so many of the trophies. But the result of this boom in the noble art of squashing another man for a prize of a few thousand pounds and the brave words that some of the lovers of this sport sometimes use, telling us that things like this made English hearts so strong, nearly giving us to understand that Sayers and his like had some influence on the fortunes of the British Empire, is that a kind of reflection is cast upon some other sports for their mildness and their timidity. Girls do not fight in rings and nearly kill each other, but girls can play golf and do, and they even play with men.

Let us consider the proposition that golf is a game that needs a greater and a stronger heart than any other game. It demands fine manliness, such determination as strong Englishmen are made of, and courage of the best. The strain of a severe golf competition on the men who win, or nearly, is enormous. No weakling has ever won success at golf, and never will. The truth is that it is such a game that if the charge is made that it is a brutal sport we can barely stand for its defence. For there is cruelty in golf, cold hurting cruelty in this game. If now you hesitate, consider. The difference between the effect of boxing and the effect of golf on the human system is that golf hurts more and the pain is more enduring, for it is psychological. That may seem like an attempted escape from the proposition, because it may be suggested that maiden aunts can and do bear such psychological pain at golf, and bear it well. But we discuss real golf of the championship kind, and match play wherein two good and keen players are really playing against each other, parry and thrust as it is in championship golf, with the issue in even balance most of the time, not taking sevens and eights and so being nearly indifferent to what the other may do until the clerking takes place on the putting green and the state of things is calculated.

Golf, as we know, is a game for the emotions. We agree that it plays upon them continually, and chiefly through the medium of the supreme emotion, hope. While this hope is the most uplifting of emotions, it is also, with the strain it makes, by far the most exhausting. Now every golfer knows that in the real game if a good stroke is made by one party the gain is not only in the extra nearness to the hole that his own ball obtains, but also by the "moral effect" the shot has on the other man. This other may have been in a good state of hope before; now he receives a sudden shock—and it is indeed a shock sometimes when in a second, as the result of the other's effort, his hope is reduced to fear or complete dejection. Do you think the man who made the shot does not know that? He knows it well. There! he knew! The dejected man has foozled, and the hole has gone. This bout is ended. There is a rest of a few seconds, and then the contestants start again and smash each other on the mind, just as they did the other time. Some may suggest that the effect of these mental hurts is small, that they draw no blood, and that they are not to be compared with a left hook on the jaw which sends a boxer toppling. To that there are replies to make. In the first place it has to be remembered that a match at golf between two good players (we do not now write of habitual foozlers in whom the golfing emotions cannot, in the nature of things, be well developed) is taken very seriously indeed, and therefore the emotional effect is greater than might be supposed by one who does not play. Second, the effect is cumulative, and every golfer knows again how intensely depressing is the continual fight against a relentless opponent who scores with nearly every stroke and never lets one's hope burn bright again. Bang goes every shot of his on the sensitive temperament of his foe, and that is exactly why temperament has all to do with success at golf. It is the man who can stand punishment who wins; no other sort ever has won in greater golf, or ever will. And then again, if it is suggested that mental pain is after all not such a hard thing to bear with courage as pain of body, let us ask which has the longer effect, remembering also that, with full respect to boxing people, the golfer is a man of keener feelings. In championships how often has a man who has had a punishing match in a morning round, one that has gone to the nineteenth hole or after before victory has come to him, won again in the afternoon? Not frequently. If you had merely with a fist blow knocked that man senseless for a little while before his lunch, he might have been readier for his golfer opponent in the afternoon. It is notorious that some of the finest play in championships has been accomplished by men who were enduring much physical suffering at the time. And again, how exactly is the effect of the winning putt on the defeated man like that of the knock-out blow. His last hope is extinguished with the suddenness of vanished consciousness. So this psychological pain is a very discomforting thing. The law recognises it, and herein the law is surely not an ass. We have the legal cruelty of the divorce court. Husband who tells his wife he dislikes her new hat or gown is held to have been cruel as though he had smacked her pretty face, or something worse than that. He could kiss away a red mark from a dimpled cheek, and surely if permitted he would do so, but nothing could change the judgment on the hat. And in golf the mental injury is more real than that.

Never was more absurdly untrue suggestion made against this game than that it is not like others where men play directly against each other and foil each other's shots, that it is a game in which each man plays his own ball independent of the other. Each stroke we make has effect on the stroke made by the opponent. That effect may be discounted by the opponent's own strength and resource, but yet it is produced. In no other game does a man play right and hard on to his opponent as in match-play golf, for it is a game in which the whole temperamental strength of one side is hurled against the strength of the other, and the two human natures are pressing bitterly and relentlessly against each other from the first moment of the game to the last. It is the whole man, mind and body. That is the meaning of the temperamental factor in golf, and that is why a great match at golf is great indeed.

Yes, it is a cruel game, one in which the primitive instincts of man are given full play, and the difference between golf and fisticuffs is that in the one the pain is of the mind and in the other it is of the body.

§

A climax in our wonderment has been reached, and though a volume could be written on the romance of the rubber-cored ball, the seventh of the wonders of the game and the most modern, the story after all is known. Golf would have gained on its old degree of popularity if there had been no such invention and men had continued to play with gutties; but that the golf boom as we know it would have been created, that the game would have risen to be the enormous thing it is, giving pleasure to hundreds of thousands of people all the world over, there is much reason to doubt. One night in the early summer of 1898 Mr. Coburn Haskell sat at dinner with a magnate of the American rubber industry, at the house of the latter in Cleveland, Ohio. They were both golfers, and naturally they talked golf during their meal. They agreed that a kindlier ball than the harsh and severe gutty was needed, and they thought that surely it might come through rubber. Eventually they settled on the idea of rubber thread wound under tension to give the necessary hardness, and an experimental ball was made accordingly. With the very first shot that was made with that first of rubber-cored balls a professional player to whom it had been given to try carried a bunker that had never been carried before! From that moment the great revolution was begun, the most extraordinary that has ever taken place in any game. There were set-backs, it was a little slow in starting, but its success was sure. In 1902, when Sandy Herd won an Open Championship with the new ball, after prejudice had held it back in Britain previously, the gutty was done for, and it quickly disappeared from the links.

And oh, the ravings and the riotings of argument there have been about that ball since then! And the hundreds of thousands of pounds that have had to be spent on courses to make them suit it! Never was there such a giant commotion nor such a costly one caused in any sport before. We need not argue any more whether it has improved the game or spoiled it. These discussions are for the schools. It has anyhow made the game in the modern popular sense, and now we are informed that of this little white ball, that was first invented at the dinner-table on those Ohio summer nights, half a million are used on British courses in one week in a busy season, and a million pounds' worth are bought and consumed by golfers in a year. Then you may be sure that more than a million dollars' worth are driven and putted on the courses of the United States. Marvellous little ball! Indeed you are the seventh wonder of your game.

CHAPTER V

A FAMOUS CHAMPIONSHIP AT BROOKLINE, U.S.A., AND AN ACCOUNT OF HOW MR. FRANCIS OUIMET WON IT, WITH SOME EXPLANATION OF SEEMING MYSTERIES.

Abiding wonders of the past, perplexities of the present, the greatness of the game where it is still greatest, have been among recent thoughts; and yet one is conscious all the time that something which sure enough comes near to being the eighth wonder of it all has lately happened, and will for long enough be high in the minds of this community, something that will never cease to be discussed and will always be regarded as a matter for argument and speculation. Only because it is so very new, so utterly modern, so contrary to much of our olden faith, so inharmonious with the smooth story that we have learned and liked, has a witness hesitated to give it a forward place well won. Yet do we not know that a hundred years from now, when so much of golfing history yet unmade will have been piled on to the dusty records that we hold, this new wonder will still be a theme for club-house talk, and if by then matches are played with the people of other planets, will they not wish to know in Mars how this strange break came about? Then there shall be as many readings and explanations of the mystery of Brookline and of Ouimet as there have been of the moods of sad Prince Hamlet. So from the old traditions, the famous players, the ancient links, the scene may move to new America.

§

To the Fourth of July there shall now be added the Twentieth of September. In the year of nineteen hundred and thirteen it fell upon a Saturday, and that day at Brookline, near Boston in Massachusetts, was dripping wet. Clouds had run loose for two whole days and nights before, unceasingly, and still sent their torrent down. When, dull and splashing, the morning broke, with expectation in the air, it seemed that this had been planned by fate for a day of wretchedness and misery, one that might with convenience afterwards be blotted out from memory and considered as a dies non. But good Americans will now recall no clouds, no rain, no damp, no mud when they remember the Twentieth of September. I too, though my feelings then were more of wonder and real admiration than of joy which my own patriotism could not sanction, shall be glad to remember in time to come that then I was at Brookline and was one of only two or three from Britain who saw the amazing thing that was done that day, the most remarkable victory ever achieved in any golf championship anywhere at any time. It was something to have seen; it is a distinction to have the remembrance. On that day Francis Ouimet, a boy of twenty, bred to the game on the cow pastures of Massachusetts, played Harry Vardon and Edward Ray, great champions of British golf, for the championship of the United States—and won. They three had come through the great ordeal of a full championship and tied for first place together. They played, not against blank possibility as men, knowing not the exact nature of their task, have to do in Open Championships where the test is play by score and each is against all others, having then some fears stilled by sweet hope which is ever the golfer's sustenance, but in sight of each other, together, one with another, man against man, ball against ball, seeing what was being done, knowing what had to be accomplished next. Could there ever again be such a three-ball golf? It is one of the compensations of having been so very wet at Brookline on that awful day that one knows that for the wonder and the drama of the thing it can never happen more, not ever. If such facts could be repeated, the wonder would be missing and the drama gone.

An American and two Englishmen. These championships are mainly matters for individuals after all; the "international element," of which we read so much in newspapers, is not generally so deeply felt as we try to think it is. Golf, not being a game of sides as other games are, and, if it comes to that, not generally a game in which national peculiarities exert an influence, hardly lends itself to international treatment. Players who feel internationally before a contest relapse to individualism completely when they are pitching to the green and putting to the hole. Do not tell me that in the throes of a six-feet putt that shall win or lose a day a man thinks of his trusting country and not of his tortured hopeful self. It is not possible in the combination of golf and human nature, and there is no blame to the men. But on the Twentieth of September international feeling in the game of golf did for once rise high, and became a very real thing. What of individualism had been maintained by Vardon and his companion during that week had nearly disappeared on the nineteenth, when the tie was made, and there was hardly a trace of it when the curtain went up on the fifth act of the amazing drama of Brookline, none at all when it was rolled down again. This point is now emphasised because when I write of the wonder of the thing I have to show that not only was this Brookline boy, of no championship whatever save one of Massachusetts, pitted against two of the greatest golfers of the home country of the game, but that, the international feeling being now alive and intense, he for America was opposed to those two of England, and therefore in a very full degree he was playing their better ball. The boy was playing the better ball of Vardon and Ray! He beat them! A long time has now elapsed since the dripping day when I saw him do it, and wonders have a way of softening with age, yet to me now that achievement is as wonderful as it was when new, and so it will remain. The American golfers are justified in their pride and their exultation upon the result of that event, and there is nothing whatever to be said against it. No such feat had ever been performed before, or has been since. I shall describe the circumstances which led up to this amazing triumph, and what ensued.

§

Only once before had British players gone across the Atlantic to take part in the Open Championship of the United States, and that was in 1900 when Harry Vardon and J. H. Taylor did so. At that time Taylor was the Open Champion, Vardon having finished second to him in that year's tournament at St. Andrews. American golf was then comparatively a baby, and practically all the opponents of the British pair were players who had been born and bred in the home country and had gone out to America as professionals there. Good as some of them were, they were no match for their visitors, who had the competition comfortably to themselves and finished first and second, Vardon becoming champion. Much happened in the next thirteen years. Most significant was the breeding of an American champion on American soil, a "native born," in J. J. M'Dermott, who tied for first place in 1910, but then lost to Alec Smith on playing off, and tied again the next year when he won, and again in 1912. About the same time two other native players in Tom M'Namara and Michael Brady came to the surface from the raw mass of rough golfing material that was taking shape under the American sun. Both are good men, and from my knowledge of them I like their manner and their style; but M'Dermott, despite some serious faults of which he has been made aware, is undoubtedly a marvellous golfer for his age. I think he has to be considered as the most wonderful prodigy the game has so far known. At twenty years of age, when he came over to Muirfield as American champion to compete for the great Open Championship, he was even then a most accomplished golfer, high in the topmost rank. Not tall in stature but well and lithely built for a golfer, he has a full, easy, and graceful swing. It is round like most of the American swings—but not so round as it used to be—and M'Dermott is often afflicted with what is commonly known as the American hook, being a most persistent tendency to pull the ball. It is remarkable also that he has been in the habit of using wooden clubs of most abnormal length, and it has been a wonder to me how he has controlled them as well as he has done. The history of the Open Championship, marked with so many crosses for tragedies and the blighting of fair hopes, embraces few incidents more pathetic than the driving of three balls into the Archerfield woods by M'Dermott in the event of 1912 at Muirfield, and his failing to qualify in consequence. But he was only twenty then. The first expedition made by a native American to this country in quest of Open Championship honours consequently failed. In the following year we saw him again at Hoylake, and with him his brother natives, M'Namara and Brady, and some of the Scoto-Americans also. M'Dermott did the best of the three, and his play for nine holes one morning was very nearly perfect. His swing was a little more compact than before; it was beautifully timed, and his straight-up style of putting with his heels touching and his grip upon the end of the shaft was most attractive. He found the conditions on the last day too severe for him, as nearly all except Taylor, the champion, did; but he made a fine display and became the first real American player to get into the prize list of the Open Championship, which he did with a score of 315—eight more than Taylor—which made him tie for fifth place. M'Dermott undoubtedly excels in temperament.

§

Here was a menace. It was felt that America was making very good in golf. And there came vaguely into the minds of British golfers the idea that a demonstration of their strength should be made in this new country, for satisfaction and for the sake of national pride. Yet, with their conservatism, our British golfing people are slow to move in matters of this kind. They are content with the game, and perhaps wisely so. But there was the feeling that something should be done. With initiative demanded, Lord Northcliffe, who had become a keen lover of the game, made a characteristic movement unobtrusively, as the result of which Harry Vardon and Edward Ray were sent across the Atlantic to test the strength of American golfers in their own Open Championship. Vardon was then five times Open Champion of the world; Ray was the holder of the title. Two other Europeans sailed the seas with the same object in their minds, one of them being Wilfrid Reid, the clever little professional attached to the Banstead Downs club near London, a man who had gained international honours constantly and has much fine golf in him, and the other Louis Tellier, the professional of the Société de Golf de Paris at La Boulie, Versailles. Four good men; two great champions; one the greatest golfer the world has known. They seemed to be enough. Their design was to win the American championship.

§

Those who were not at Brookline during the week that followed, and only received a result that was amazing and inexplicable, were ready enough, perhaps not unnaturally, to suggest that this course of the Country Club could not have afforded a proper test, that it was so far different from a good British course, so mysteriously American, that the native players must have been favoured by it, and the superior skill that the British golfers possessed had no opportunity for an outlet. As I say, this was not an unreasonable supposition in the light of the amazing events that occurred; but it was entirely wrong. There are few courses in America that are better than this one, and to this judgment I would add that though there are inland courses in England that are superior there are not many. Judged upon the best standard of inland courses in Britain I would call it thoroughly good.

It has seven holes of over four hundred yards each, one of them being five hundred and twenty, and, the total length of the round being 6245 yards, it was good enough in this respect. It has three short holes, well separated, and some of its drive-and-iron-holes are quite excellent. The Brookline course differs from many others in America in the quick and varied undulations of its land—heaving, rolling, twisting everywhere—and thus calling for adaptability of stance, and careful reckoning of running after pitching at every shot. By this feature the play is made as interesting as it should be, but often is not. Only two of the holes on the course are quite flat and plain, and these are novelties. They are the first and eighteenth, which take straight lines parallel to each other through the great polo field alongside the club-house. Polo is a considerable feature of the scheme of the Country Club, and its comparatively small territory is not to be interfered with for the sake of the golfers who have so much more of Massachusetts for their delectation. Yet it is necessary to play through this polo field. Consequently we start the round at one end of it and play a hole of 430 yards right along past the grand stand. Then away we go out into the country, over the hills and along the dales, and through the trees and cuttings where rocks were blasted, and, after many adventures, return to the smooth plain land of the polo field as to the straight run home at the end of a steeplechase, and play along positively the plainest 410-yard hole I have ever seen. The tee is at one end of the polo field, with the grand stand in the middle distance on the left. There is not a bunker along that field, but there is rough grass on the left of the part designated for the fairway, and there is the same with a horse-racing track as well on the right. At the far end of the field, near to the club-house, the race-track, of course, bends round and comes across the line of play. Just on the other side of that track the ground rises up steeply for three or four yards, and then up there sloping upwards and backwards is the putting green. Thus the race-track becomes a hazard to guard the green, and the green is on a high plateau with big trees all round it. The hole is there all complete, with hardly a thing done to it by man, and it is one of the most remarkable examples I have seen of a piece of ready-made golf of the plainest possible description, resulting in something fairly good. It is 410 yards long, and if the tee shot is a little defective the attempt to reach the green with the second is going to be a heartbreaking business. With a good drive that second shot, played with a cleek perhaps, or the brassey may be needed, has to be uncommonly well judged and true. The margin for error is next to nothing. At the first glance at it I thought that this eighteenth hole was very stupid, but it is a hole that grows a little upon you, and the original impression has been withdrawn from my mind. It was the last hope of Vardon and Ray, and it failed them. The fairway at Brookline is far better than on the average American course, and if one says that its putting greens are among the very best in America, the greatest possible compliment is paid to them.

There have been many touches of romance in the history of golf at the Country Club, but none more remarkable than that associated with the construction of the comparatively new ninth, tenth, and eleventh holes, two long ones with a short one between them, which are among the nicest holes in all America. For some years after the beginning of this century, when golf at Brookline had become a very big thing, these holes did not exist, their predecessors being embraced in the other parts of the course. But, for the crossing that they involved, those predecessors had become dangerous, and it was determined to take in a new tract of land, and to make three new holes upon it. It was a tremendous undertaking, for "land" was only a kind of courtesy title for the wild mixture of forest, rock, and swamp into which a man might sink up to his neck, but for which about 25,000 dollars had to be paid, while another thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars had to be spent in making it fit for golf and preparing the holes, so that these three cost an average of about thirteen thousand dollars a hole, or roughly £2500 as we may say if we are English. At the ninth as much rock had to be blasted as some one afterwards used to make a wall two hundred yards long, and the best part of a yard in thickness. The tenth hole is a very delightful short one, with the green in a glade far below the tee. They call it "The Redan," because Mr. G. Herbert Windeler (long resident in America, but English in nationality still, despite his past presidency of the U.S.G.A.), who is largely responsible for the golf at Brookline, and designed and superintended the construction of these holes, had the famous piece of golf at North Berwick in his mind when he planned this one, but before the end he departed far from the original conception, and all for the good of the hole. When it was being made the place for the green needed raising from the swamp, and nearly two thousand loads of broken rocks were deposited there; and after soil to a depth of eighteen inches had been laid upon the stone foundation a splendid putting green was made. With all its variety, this is not a course of such intricacy and such mystery as St. Andrews is, to need long weeks of study and practice to understand every shot upon it. You may play St. Andrews from childhood to old age and yet be puzzled and mistaken sometimes, but Brookline is more candid than that, and it is to its credit that with all its variety you may be completely acquainted with it in a very few days. Let me say then that the suggestion that Mr. Ouimet had a distinct advantage in a knowledge of the course obtained in his childhood, and maintained thenceforth by frequent practice on the course near to which he lived, is quite nonsense. He had no advantage whatever. Vardon and Ray had practised there for several days in advance, and if they did not know all about it that there was to know it was their own fault. They did know, and local knowledge, which counts for far less with great golfers than men a little their inferiors, had nothing to do with the issue.

§

Now consider the other circumstances, that the proper meaning and significance of the result may be understood, and that neither too much merit shall be awarded, nor too much blame. There were about a hundred and sixty competitors, and I would call the field a strong one, but of course not nearly so strong as the field for our Open Championship. Such men as two of the triumvirate were missing, and a highly respectable company of past champions, while there were no such English amateurs in the list as Mr. Graham, Mr. Lassen, and Mr. Michael Scott to make an occasional disturbance. But there were other amateurs. Compared to a British open championship field it was weak at the top and weak in the middle. Everybody who goes to our open championships knows that there, for three parts of the trial, there are comparative nobodies bobbing up from nowhere and creating all kinds of excitement by breaking the records of the courses, and fixing themselves up elegantly at the top of the list. There they sit like civilians on an imperial dais, but always they topple off before the end. Not one of them has ever remained to the finish, so that if the American entry was weak in this respect, Americans might argue that it did not matter anyhow since this middle part was not the one to count. Yet it always has its effect. But then the Americans may also point out that they too had their middle men who came to the front and created disturbances, only quitting the heights in time to make room for the winner and his attendants. There was young M'Donald Smith, and there were Barnes and Hagin, who had come up out of the wild west—and one of them, saying it respectfully to his splendid golf, looked a cowboy too—and were distinct menaces until the last rounds came to be played. Then in estimating the strength of this American field remember that M'Dermott, who is undoubtedly high class, and was in the prize list at the Open Championship at Hoylake, was not nearly a winner here, and remember also that imported players of the high quality of Tom Vardon and Robert Andrew were not in it either. Altogether it is my judgment that the field was stronger than imagined in England, yet not nearly so strong as ours. Following a favourite American practice of reducing to percentages every estimate, however necessarily indefinite, such as even the comparative charms of wives and sweethearts, I would give the strength of a British field the hundred, and I would give sixty-five to this of America. I knew that I should fall to that percentage system some time, and now I have. For its strong variety, and for its flavour of cosmopolitanism, it was an interesting entry. The professionals all over the States—and the amateurs, too, for that matter—came up to Brookline from north, south, east and west, for what they felt was a great occasion, and over the border from Canada they came as well. Up from Mexico came Willie Smith, the Willie who was teethed in golf at his Carnoustie home, and whom we never shall forget as he who broke the record—and holds it with George Duncan still—for the old course at St. Andrews in the very last round that was played at the beginning of an Open Championship meeting there a few years ago. It was really a wonderful field, and its units presented a wealth of material for study and contemplation in matters of style and method during the first day or two. And yet for all the variety of players I doubt whether there was so much difference in ways as we see in a big championship at home. The American golfing system is a little plainer, I think. Of course it was by far the largest entry that had ever been received for the American open event, and this fact necessitated a departure to some extent from established American custom, and one which we of Britain with unenviable experience of many processes in qualifying competitions could not congratulate the Americans on having to make. However, the numbers were not so large as to cause such trouble, even with a qualifying competition, as we experience in England and Scotland, and consequently a two-days' affair worked it smoothly through, the field being divided into two sections, and each man playing his two rounds off in one day and getting done with it. It was settled that the top thirty players in each section, and those who tied for the thirtieth place, should pass into the competition proper for the championship, which, as here and elsewhere, consists of four rounds of stroke play, two on each of two successive days.

The United States Golf Association always manages its championships very well indeed with no more red tape than is necessary, but with an exactness of method which might serve as a fine lesson to some other great golfing countries that I have in mind. In this present case Mr. Robert Watson, President for the year of the U. S. G. A., after all his splendid work as secretary of the Association, was in charge of all the arrangements and as administrator-in-chief was the most energetic man during the whole of the week at Brookline. It was fitting that in his year of presidency, so well deserved, there should be this ever memorable happening to mark the season out from all others. Mr. Herbert Jacques, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, and Mr. John Reid, the new secretary of the U. S. G. A., were in the nature also of generals of the headquarters staff, and they laboured constantly in an upper room late at night working out the details of business when other persons on whom responsibility was more lightly cast, with cocktails to help, might be pondering over the tense problem as to what was going to happen next. The general idea of the system was much the same as we have it in Britain, as there is hardly much scope for variety in matters of this kind.

§

Now—Ouimet. It is easy for the Americans and others to compose anthems about him now, but little enough did they know or think of this Massachusetts boy until they saw that he was really winning, and then the remark that I heard of an ex-American champion to him in the dressing-room shortly after it was all over, "Well done, Francis, and there are lots more in the country like you!" was not only lacking in compliment and taste, but was not true. America is by no means full of Ouimets, and never will be. I had met him at Chicago in 1912, and heard of him next in a letter that I received just before starting for America in the following summer, which gave me particulars of what happened in the match in the closing stages of the Massachusetts State Championship between my old friend, Mr. John G. Anderson, and Mr. Ouimet, in which it was stated that Mr. Ouimet had done the last nine holes in that match as follows—yards first and figures after: 260 yards (4), 497 yards (3), 337 yards (4), 150 yards (2), 394 yards (3), 224 yards (3), 250 yards (3), 320 yards (3), 264 yards (3). So he did the last six holes in 17 strokes, and no wonder that poor John remarked, "I have never played in any match in my life where I did the last six holes in three over 3's and lost four of them, as I did on this occasion!" Of course Mr. Ouimet became State champion, and I determined to have a good look at him as soon as I got on the other side of the Atlantic. On the day after my arrival in New York I was down at the Garden City Club, the Amateur Championship taking place there the following week, and at lunch time Mr. Anderson, who was at another table with Ouimet, called me over. "Well, Mr. Ouimet, I suppose you have a big championship in your bag this season," was just the proper thing to say, and he answered something about doing his best, but feeling he might be better at stroke play. "Then," said I, "there is the Open Championship to take place in your own golfing country," and with that we tackled the chicken. He is a nice, open-hearted, modest, sporting golfer, and was only twenty years old in the May of his great championship year. Tall, lithe and somewhat athletic in figure and movement, he takes excellent care of himself in a semi-training sort of way. He abstains from alcohol entirely, and though he smokes a few cigarettes when "off duty" he rarely does so while playing, having the belief that the use of tobacco has a temporary effect on the eyesight, such as is not conducive to accuracy of play. He agreed entirely with a suggestion I put to him, in conversation, that most golfers make the mistake of playing too much and lose keenness in consequence, and he thinks that the American players in general are by no means at such a disadvantage as is sometimes imagined. The winter rest gives them extra keenness in the spring and summer, and that is everything. He does not play at all from November to April, but keeps himself fit with skating and ice hockey, while during the season he only plays one round three times a week, and two full rounds on Sundays. Business considerations—he is engaged at a Boston athletic store—have something to do with this system, no doubt, but he thinks it sound. I looked at his bag of clubs; there are no freaks in it. It comprises ten items, an ivory-faced driver, a brassey, six irons including a jigger and mashie niblick, and two putters, one being of the ordinary aluminium kind and the other a wry-neck implement, the latter being most used. As to his style of golf, its outstanding characteristics are three: it is plain, like the style of most American golfers, and free from any striking individuality; it is straight; and it is marvellously steady and accurate. A marked feature of most of the American players is that their swing is very round and flat, and that they get a pronounced hook on their ball. Mr. Ouimet's swing is rather more upright than that of most of the others, he keeps an exceedingly straight line and has full length—as much as Vardon. I said he had no peculiarities, but there is just this one, that he grips his club with what is called the interlocking grip. This is a way of grasping the club that some professionals employed during the early period of general transition from the plain grip to the overlapping. Mr. Ouimet's little finger of the right hand just goes between the first and second of the left hand, while the left thumb goes round the shaft instead of into the palm of the right hand. Such a grip may suit a man who uses it, but it can hardly have any advantages. I note as a further peculiarity that the right forefinger is crooked up away from the shaft, so that the tip of the finger only comes to the leather at the side. This has to some considerable extent the effect of throwing that finger out of action, and as a means of reducing the right hand's power for evil is not to be condemned. Many other players have sought some such method of crippling the very dangerous hand.

But after all it is not the shots he plays, good as they are, dependable as they always seem to be, as the qualities of temperament with which they are supported. He has a golfing temperament of very peculiar perfection, wanting perhaps in imagination but remarkably serviceable to his game. He seems to have the power to eliminate entirely the mental oppression of the other ball or balls; he can play his own game nearly regardless of what others play against him. From the mere sporting point of view he misses something in the way of emotions perhaps, those rare emotions which some of us derive when we are fighting hard to keep our match alive and at a crisis become hopelessly bunkered; but he gains enormously in strokes and successes. When he settles down to his match or round, he can concentrate more deeply than any other man I know or have heard of. He sees his ball, thinks what he should do with it, and has the course and the hole in his mental or optical vision all the time, just those and nothing else. The other balls do not exist, and the scores that are made against him do not exist either. He has told me that in important golf, and indeed in that most mightily important play-off against Vardon and Ray, he was wholly unaware until it came to the putting what his opponents had done, and generally he had not seen their balls after they had driven them from the tee. Vardon and Ray pounded away as hard as they could, but their shots had no more effect on Ouimet than the patting of an infant's fist would have on the cranium of a nigger. He just went on and did better. Andrew Kirkaldy once said of Harry Vardon at the beginning of his career that he had the heart of an iron ox, and that is like Ouimet's. This championship will always be something of a mystery; but in this statement about the Ouimet temperament there is the nearest thing to a solution of it that can ever be offered. I know that what I say is the simple truth, partly from observation, partly from inquiry, and partly from Mr. Ouimet's statements to me. He said he was unaware of the presence of the crowd on the fourth day when he made the tie until he was in the neighbourhood of the seventeenth green.

See how interesting he becomes despite the plainness of his game. When such achievements as his of the 20th of September are made they rarely suffer from any want of added romance. On the day in question Mr. Ouimet, champion as he had become, told me in a talk we had, how he began the game when he was about four years of age. He was a French Canadian by blood, but his parents had come over the border and their little family settled at Brookline close to the sixteenth green of the Country Club. His elder brothers played a kind of golf, and he watched them and began to practise himself on some pasture land near his home. Then he became a caddie at Brookline, played the game more seriously than before, with three clubs that a member of the Country Club gave to him, and at sixteen years of age won, at the second attempt, the championship of his school. They make a feature of school championships in America. This story was attractive enough, but the next day, reading the American papers, one gathered that there was some of the romance of a Joan of Arc about this boy of Brookline. His mother said that when Francis was a little boy of six or seven he would cross the road and sit for hours fascinated by watching the members of the Country Club at the game. Then he wanted to become a caddie, and maternal objections did not avail. He became a caddie. His mother also said that he learned much of the game then, and would always try to get engaged by the strongest players, and he would copy as well as he could their best strokes. He passed from the grammar school to the Brookline High School, but his mind was more on golf than on his books. The mother used to hear noises up in his room at night. Once she was frightened by what she heard, and went to his room at midnight fearing that he was sick. She found him putting on the floor, and he then confessed that he had often done that kind of thing before. On that occasion he had thought while in bed of a new grip and wished to try it. He did not care to wait until the morning. The parents desired their son to get all advantage from education that he could, but after two years at the high school he insisted on leaving and was engaged at a Boston store where golf goods are dealt in. All that and more was said of him.

§

In a narrative of this kind circumstances and reasonable deductions are everything, and shots are next to nothing, for there is little enough to be said about a ball in the air or its place of stopping. Only one man knows the truth about a golf stroke as it is played, and that is the man who plays it. Very often even the most expert observers are quite wrong in their inferences and judgments. I have explained most of the circumstances already. On the first of the two qualifying days, Mr. Ouimet came very near to taking first place in the list, for he had a score of 152, and only Harry Vardon beat him, and by one stroke only, as the result of a long putt on the last green of all. The weather was fine and the greens were fiery on that Tuesday. Next day there was more wind and there were indications of a change of weather coming. Autumn gusts were breaking the leaves from the tree-tops. That day Ray headed the qualifying list with 148, Wilfrid Reid was next to him with 149, M'Dermott was 161 and Mr. Travers was 165. This was good business for England, even though it yielded nothing but a little temporary prestige. Then came Thursday, and in the early morning and up to a little while after play began there was much rain, and the greens were considerably slowed down. They were, indeed, reduced to a soaking state in time, and Tom M'Namara told me that once or twice he had actually, instead of putting, to root his ball with a niblick out of the greens, into which they had buried themselves on pitching. But Brookline stood the weather test very well.

First rounds are seldom eventful; the value of the play done in them seems to be discounted by the circumstance that there are three more rounds to come. M'Dermott did a 74 in this round, Vardon and Reid 75's, Mr. Ouimet 77, and Ray 79, but even M'Dermott was three strokes behind the leaders. In the afternoon round Ray recovered brilliantly with a 70, Vardon and Reid both did 72's, and Mr. Ouimet 74; and at the end of this first proper day Vardon and Reid were at the head of the list with aggregates of 147, Ray was next with 149, while Mr. Ouimet was seventh with 151. Again the British invaders looked well in their place, and that night they were strong favourites for the championship. "America has a fight on hands," "Little left but hope," and such like, were the headings in newspapers. As I lay in bed at the Country Club that night, I heard the rain pour ceaselessly down. It rained all through the night and alas! all the next day as well, and the great events of that Friday were watched through a heavy downpour. In their third rounds Vardon did 78, Ray 76, and Mr. Ouimet, who was playing nearly a whole round behind the others, and with wonderful steadiness, did a 74: and so it came about that with the competition three parts done, all these three were at the top with aggregates of 225. Now was the time for the Englishmen's efforts if they were to be made. To their own chagrin they could not make them when they needed. Ray took 43 to the turn, in his fourth round, Vardon, whose putting all the week was distinctly moderate, and the chief cause for his inefficiency, took 42, and though both finished better, their two 79's were bad and seemed to have cost them the championship. Vardon certainly thought they had, and took a very gloomy view of things. I spoke to him a little while after he had finished, and he said he was sorry and that they could not win then. His putting had let him down, he said, as he had been afraid it would, though he felt that the rest of his game had never been played better. "There are three or four out there who will beat us," said the melancholy Vardon. It looked like that, but the American hopes one by one failed to materialise. Hagin fell out; Barnes fell out; M'Dermott fell out. Goodness! it was going to be a tie between Vardon and Ray after all, and these two Englishmen would play off here at Boston for the American championship! Hereupon said Englishmen came out to see what was happening, and looked happy again. They smiled. Then men came running and breathless from distant parts with tidings of Ouimet. He had had a worried way to the turn, but had improved afterwards, so rumour said. I went along with our British champions to pick him up at the fourteenth green, and there when he came along, we found that if he did the last four holes in a total of one under par he would tie with the leaders, or, in other words, if he did the miraculous and practically impossible he might be permitted to have a game next day.

I shall never forget watching that boy play those last four holes; that was the real fight for the championship. Their respective lengths and par figures are 370 yards (4), 128 yards (3), 360 yards (4), 405 yards (4). They were stiff pars, too, you will see, with nothing given away, especially as the turf was soaking. At one of those holes he had to gain a stroke on par if he were to tie, and the others must be done in par. A slip anywhere would surely be fatal. It seemed that that slip was made with the second shot at the fifteenth, for he was wide of the green on the right and had to pitch from the rough, but he was dead with his third and got the 4 after all. At the sixteenth he holed a three yards' putt for the 3 and still was level with par. The much-wanted stroke was given to him at the next hole, which is a dog-legged thing bending to the left, with rough and bunkers to be avoided. He played it with good judgment always, and this time, on the green with his second, he holed a nine-yards putt for a 3. Thus he was left to get the home hole in 4 to tie, and by holing a five-feet putt with not a second's hesitation, just as if everything in golf had not seemed to depend upon it, he tied. Jupiter!

§

According to American golfing law and precedent the tie had to be decided by one extra round, all three playing together. I have no fault to find with this arrangement; perhaps the result would have been the same if two rounds had had to be played. I know, however, that Vardon thought it would have been better and proper if each had played separately, with a marker. Most people thought that as Ouimet was almost playing the better ball of the two Englishmen he could not possibly win. Theoretically he was sure to have slept badly overnight and to be in a terrible state of nerves in the morning. They might see him top his first tee shot and be three strokes to the bad on the first green. Really I had no such ideas, and when I saw him hit his first drive as well, cleanly and straight as any drive ever need be made, I had no doubts about his having slept. Vardon drove the straightest ball and then deliberately played short of the muddy race-track in front of the green, but Mr. Ouimet boldly took his brassey, went for the carry, and just did it. The hole was done in 5 each, and the second in 4 each; but at the third Ray, who had driven too much to the right and had a bad stance below his ball, only just got to the corner of the green, a long way from the pin, with his second, and then took three putts, thus dropping a stroke behind the others. At the fourth and fifth, at the latter of which Mr. Ouimet put a spoon shot out of bounds through his club slipping in his hands, but recovered splendidly with the same club, the score remained the same. Then at the sixth, a drive and pitch up a hill, Vardon approached to within three yards, and the others to within six yards of the pin, Vardon holing his putt and Mr. Ouimet (who decided on consideration to concentrate on his 4) and Ray just missing. So Vardon was then one stroke better than the American, and the latter still one less than Ray who, by a better run up from the edge of the green at the seventh, scored over both his opponents. At the eighth there was a dramatic episode, for Mr. Ouimet laid a low approach stone-dead and holed for a 3, while Ray ran down a twelve yards' putt for another 3, Vardon being beaten here though getting a perfect par 4. All were level and the excitement and suspense intense. Something was expected to happen at the ninth, the longest hole on the course, and a great, romantic piece of golf. It is a long, heaving hole carved through rock, and partly built on a swamp, and away in the far distance is a high plateau green which, seen through the rain and mist, looked like a ghostly thing in the clouds. Here Vardon slashed out for length, but with a hook sent his ball into the woods. Yet he recovered well, and after stress and strain by all three this tortuous hole was done in five each. The parties were all level at the turn with 38 strokes each. Immediately afterwards Mr. Ouimet went to the front, and was never deprived of the lead. The tenth hole is the short one named "The Redan," with a heavily bunkered green low down in a valley below the tee. Each tee shot was right, but Vardon and Ray were poor on the green and took three putts, while the American was down in one less. Vardon looked serious now, and Ray was fidgetty. There were three 4's at the eleventh, and then Mr. Ouimet reached the twelfth green with his second, four yards from the pin, Vardon and Ray being just off on opposite sides. They both took five to hole out. Mr. Ouimet, by boldness, might have gained two strokes here, but he was a trifle short with his putt and was satisfied with a profit of one. This was followed by Vardon holing a three-yard putt and getting a point back, but at the fourteenth there were ominous signs of the British game collapsing, for Vardon went into the woods again, Ray shot off wildly to the right with his second, and they were both well out of it with 5's, like Mr. Ouimet whose brassey shot went too low to clear properly a bank in front. Mr. Ouimet told me that at this stage he felt he was going to win. Not one of the three had been bunkered so far, but at the fifteenth Ray was caught and, needing two strokes for recovery, was virtually done for.

The last stage of the struggle lay between Vardon and Mr. Ouimet. Both got 3's at the short sixteenth. Vardon was looking anxious and worried, for most brilliant play on his own part could not save him now, and he could only hope that Mr. Ouimet would come by disaster. Instead of that he himself, trying to cut the corner of the dog-legged seventeenth too finely in an effort to gain distance, was bunkered. Ray, in wild desperation, had hurled himself with terrific force at the ball on the tee in an impossible attempt to carry straight over the bunkers and the rough in a straight line to the green. As to Mr. Ouimet, he just played an easy iron shot to the green dead on the line of the pin and holed a six-yard putt for 3 and a gain of two clear strokes. It was really finished then, and in the circumstances the playing of the last hole was a formality. Mr. Ouimet did it steadily for par 4; Vardon was caught in the race track before the green and took 6, and Ray holed a fruitless putt for 3. Mr. Ouimet was champion, and there was an end of it. Seeing that history was made, let me set down the scores:—

Mr. Ouimet's score exactly equalled that of the better ball of Vardon and Ray.

§

I shall say no more about what happened immediately afterwards than that the American crowd gave a hearty demonstration of the fact that they were very pleased indeed. A considerable sum of money was raised by a collection for Mr. Ouimet's little caddie, Eddie Lowry, who was a wonder of a mite and inspired the new champion throughout the week with all sorts of advice. He would tell him in the mornings to take time over his putts as it was then only ten o'clock and he had until six at night to play; would remind him again at a suitable moment that America was expecting great things from him, and, above all, whispered gently to him on handing him his club for each shot that he must be careful to keep his eye on the ball! It is declared, moreover, that at the beginning of the tie round he assured his master that a 72 would that time be forthcoming. Little Eddie Lowry had his share of glory.

And now what about it all? How is it to be explained? Vardon and Ray generously and properly admitted they were beaten fairly and squarely on their merits. They could not say otherwise. I believe that Vardon came to the conclusion at the end of his American tour that he played worse golf at that championship than anywhere else, but on that final day on which everything depended he did not play so badly as he may have thought, and his putting was better than usual. I would not like to guarantee either Englishman to do much better in the same conditions at any time. On the other hand, Mr. Ouimet was blessed with no special luck, except that negative kind of luck that kept his ball out of trouble always, and made two putts invariably sufficient. His driving was as long as Vardon's, and he was the straightest of all, while he missed some putts by half-inches. He played a bold game too, and the only semblance of timidity was in occasionally being a trifle short with long putts, while Vardon and Ray, desperate, but in proper principle, were giving the hole every chance and often running past it. Mr. Ouimet seemed to general his own game so thoroughly well. Talking to me afterwards, he explained completely his policy at every shot in the match, and showed himself to be a thinker of the finest strain. He was all for running approaches instead of pitched ones that day, because he feared the ball embedding itself in the soft turf, and also felt that when running it would be more likely to shed dirt that it picked up and leave him a clean putt. Everything was considered and well decided, and in his argument one could find no flaw. And he insisted that he just played his own game and never watched the other balls. "Looking back on it all," said he, "I think it was just this way, that Vardon and Ray rather expected me to crack, not having the experience for things like this as they had, and when the time went on and I did not crack but went along with them, I think it had an unfavourable effect on them. That is the way I reason it out, because when you expect a man to crack and he doesn't, you lose a little of your sureness yourself. I began to feel that the championship was coming to me when we were about the fourteenth hole, for Ray then seemed to be going, and he was swinging rather wildly at the ball." I think that Mr. Ouimet's explanation was tolerably near the truth. Some of the secret history of this championship may never be written, but I know that Harry Vardon realised when it was too late that he had been paying insufficient attention to what Mr. Ouimet was doing, and what the possibilities were in that direction. At the beginning he felt that the real contest lay between him and Ray, never dreaming that Mr. Ouimet could hold out against them. Therefore he concentrated on Ray, as it were, and when he had Ray beaten he realised too late that there was some one else. It may have made no difference, but a thousand times have we had demonstrated to us the capacity of our champions for playing "a little bit extra" when it is really needed. Anyhow it was Vardon's own mistake, if it was one, and he is very sorry for it.

A consideration of great importance is the way in which this victory was confirmed, as it were, by the other events of the week. It does not generally happen that the men who distinguish themselves in preliminary qualifying competitions go through winners of championships afterwards. Men can rarely play their best for six rounds in succession, and, the law of averages being at work all the time, they would rather perform indifferently in the first test, so long as they qualify, than beat all the others. I do not recall a case where the champion would have been champion if all six rounds had been counted in, instead of the four of the competition proper. But this time at Brookline we had seven rounds played, and the astonishing fact is that, if all seven rounds were counted in, Mr. Ouimet would still be at the top with a score of 528 against Ray's 530 and Vardon's 532. I think that this is a point which has not been much realised, and it is one of importance in dealing with the idea that a fluke victory was achieved. You can hardly have a fluke victory in four stroke rounds; much less can you have one in seven. Now I would suggest that if Vardon and Ray had dropped behind in the scoring, and had occupied other places than they did in the final aggregates, there might have been some good support for the fluke theory. Their defeat by several people would have needed far more explanation, because it would have been clear that, for some reason, they were beaten by golfers inferior to themselves. Conditions and climate would have become considerations of greater importance. But merely the fact that these men finished second and third in such a big field indicates that there was little fluke anywhere, for this was a marvellous vindication of form in competition, in a game where form is so much affected by fortune. And, finally, the fact that Mr. Ouimet beat these men in the play-off when he had them both there in sight, playing stroke against stroke with him, and not an invisible field without any definite menace as in the previous play, was quite enough to stamp him as the most thoroughly deserving champion of that week. British golfing pride will force the suggestion to many minds that such a thing, proper as it was on this occasion, could never happen again; that if the championship were replayed in the same conditions Mr. Ouimet would be beaten. But of how many champions could it be said that if they had to play the event over again a week or a month later, the luck of the game being what it is, they would repeat their triumph? Reflecting once more that this was but a boy of twenty, and the real greatness of our players being what it is, I am more amazed than ever at what has happened. It was an American victory and America takes the credit, but, again, the United States are by no means full of Ouimets. I look upon him as a first-class prodigy, such as the game has never known before, produced in the country where such a golfing prodigy was most likely to make his appearance. He accomplished what had never been done before, and what I feel sure will never be done again, and because it was such an historic happening, and there were so few from England there to see it as I did, I have told the tale in full. Nobody believes that Mr. Ouimet is as great as Harry Vardon and Edward Ray. He could not be. But also I do not think that any one else could do what he did at Brookline on that occasion. I found, a long time after the occurrence, that many wise American golfers, reflecting dispassionately if still proudly upon it, gave a certain satisfaction to their reason by suggesting as a final explanation that a miracle had happened. That is a good way out of our difficulties, and for my own part I accept it, for it is the only explanation that will stand all tests. A miracle happened at Brookline on that Twentieth of September.

CHAPTER VI

THE BEGINNINGS OF GOLF IN THE UNITED STATES, AND EXPERIENCES IN TRAVELLING THERE, WITH AN EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN CLUB MANAGEMENT.

There is little done to solve the mysteries of golf's beginning by pressing into the farthest recesses of American golfing history. Only by such little twinklings in the darkness of the almost prehistoric period of the game do we begin more to suspect that, being such a natural and simple thing, an almost inevitable kind of pastime despite its man-made intricacies and laws, and all its heartenings and maddenings, it came up of itself in different places, when man had reached full intelligence and the desire to play properly other games than such as bowls. Those Indian braves who wandered and hunted and fought over that magnificent land when in its virgin state must have tried to knock something like a ball, or a stone, in the direction of a particular mark, and that would be a game for them. I remember hearing that several years ago a visitor to one of the reservations found several of the red men playing golf of a kind, with real clubs and balls. "Purple Cloud" was the champion of the braves. Then in the autumn of 1903 another white wanderer looked in upon the Indians in the reservation at Montana and reported that he had witnessed a very spirited game. Golf, said he, is much better suited to the Indian of to-day than his old game of lacrosse. He noticed very few subtleties in the game. When the champion, "Spotted Horse," drove off, there was a long stretch of clear prairie, with only here and there a shrub, so that the game resolved itself into a chase of the ball for a couple of miles and a return, the one who did it in the fewest strokes being the winner. He saw some really capital drives, several well over three hundred yards, he thought. The only thing that was very new and characteristic about these red men's golf, so far as he could see, was that the spectators "made a most infernal row all the time that the play was in progress." When a brave took his stance for a tee shot, it was looked upon as the signal for a perfect bedlam of yells and howling, which should have disconcerted the player but did not do so. And with my own eyes have I seen the modern Indians playing for the American championship, and it might be claimed that though laws be made at St. Andrews, and interpretations thereof in the council chamber of the white men at New York, this after all, in essentials, is a game that is native of the soil. Yet the history of such a game down the Indian line must be hazy as the history of the braves themselves, and we must leave it now with this ample recognition.

But though in names and other matters there is a Scottish flavour in some of the records of the earliest American golf, and when it became a real and growing thing it was obviously imported, one is sometimes inclined to think that the Simpsonian theory of the spontaneous generation of golf, or what approximated in essentials to golf, must have applied to America as to other countries. A stick, a ball, a mark, and there is the principle of golf fully indicated.

In a primitive way also it was played in America in the seventeenth century, and, as in the homeland, some of the earliest references to it that remain take the form of warnings of the punishments accruing to players who departed from such severe restrictions as were imposed. It was not proclaimed what advantages would be yielded men who played, as is done to-day, but what grievous penalties they should suffer if they played it when and where they should not, and alas! the times and places that were forbidden appeared to be many in proportion to those when the game might be enjoyed by those who liked it. Then as now, and in America as in happy England, those who were not of golf were against it, and bitterly. There were jealousies then as ever since. There were those often-quoted Laws and Ordinances of the New Netherlands of 1659 in which, because of a complaint by the burghers of Fort Orange and the village of Berwyck about the damage done to their windows and the danger to which they were exposed of being wounded by persons who played golf along the streets, the golfers were threatened of consequences to come. Then clearly the game was played in South Carolina in 1788, for at that time an advertisement appeared in a local newspaper thus: "Anniversary of the South Carolina Golf Club will be held at Williams's Coffee House on Thursday, 29th instant, when members are requested to attend at 2 o'clock precisely, that the business of the Club may be transacted before dinner." Here there is a clear indication of the close connection maintained between the playing of the game and the social ceremonies about the dinner-table that were held by the golfers on the same day in the way that was practised by the early golfers of the Scottish centres and of Blackheath. For many years afterwards these meetings of the South Carolina Golf Club were held at the club-house on what was known as "Harton's Green," which is now in the heart of Charleston. Perhaps this was the first golf club-house in America, and if that were so it shared the fate of pioneer establishments in many other places where towns have widened and gathered in the outlying lands. There is also preserved in the archives the form of invitation that was sent to Miss Eliza Johnston to attend the ball of the Savannah Golf Club at the Exchange hall in that city in December 1811. And then American golf seems to have lapsed and slept like Van Winkle in the Catskills until the time of the great regeneration came near the end of last century. One does not come now to make a history of American golf, but only to indicate that new and republican America also has something in the way of golf traditions.

§

The real beginning of American golf was made, as you may know, out at Yonkers up the Hudson, and Mr. John Reid, the elder, is rightly regarded as the father of American golf. Such recognition being of long standing and his claims being incontestable, he was again publicly and officially proclaimed as such at the silver jubilee celebration that was held in New York on November 19, 1913. That was twenty-five years from the time when the game was really set going in the States. One night I sat over a log fire in a club-house in Massachusetts and heard the story of the foundation by his father from the lips of Mr. John Reid, the younger, secretary of the United States Golf Association. He told me how his father and Robert Lockhart, who went to the same school in Scotland, came to America together; how Lockhart who, as a buyer of goods, had to pay periodical visits to his homeland, talked of the strange game that was played there; how Mr. Reid became interested and asked for clubs and balls to be brought across the water; how he tried the swings and strokes in a field by their house at Yonkers, the son "fielding" for the father; how the captain of a steamer was persuaded to bring another set of clubs over with him, and how irons were thereafter cast in America. Then he told me how other people, few but keen, were attracted to this new pastime that the Reids were trying, and how the first little club was formed here at Yonkers in November 1888, and called the St. Andrews Golf Club. They were as the golfing fathers. I learned how the members came to be known as the Apple Tree Gang because of the tree near to the first hole on which they hung their coats; how six holes were laid out at the beginning on Mr. Reid's land, his house being used as a club-house; how he gave a medal which was the first prize ever put up for competition in America—and it was for an annual thirty-six holes stroke competition—and how it was won for eleven years, three in succession, by Mr. George Sands. Those were days of consequence. From that little beginning the St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, after many changes and enlargements, has risen to a place of importance and honour in American golf.

These little histories and traditions of American golf do become attractive as one probes more deeply into them. It was in Massachusetts that the most remarkable thing that has ever taken place in the history of the game on the other side of the Atlantic, or anywhere perhaps—meaning, of course, the Ouimet triumph—happened lately, and I have been much attracted to the story of the beginning of golf in that part of the American world, and not less so when I see that the start was made such a very little while before the birth of the boy who won that great championship at Brookline. American golf and Ouimet have grown up together. One finds that in the summer of 1892 a young lady from Pau went on a visit to Mr. Arthur Hunnewell, at Wellesley, Mass., and took with her a set of golf clubs and balls. They had been playing the game for a long time past at Pau, but it was only just being started in other parts of France. After Yonkers it had been reproduced at Shinnecock and one or two other places, but so far Massachusetts had not known it. The girl showed Mr. Hunnewell how the clubs were used, and some relatives of his, owning adjacent estates and being fond of outdoor pastimes, watched and were won quickly to the game. On the first of June Mr. Hunnewell wrote down in his diary, "F. B. arrived to-day from Europe"; and on the fifteenth of September, "We are getting quite excited about golf." A fortnight later he wrote that "J. B. is here and plays golf all day." I calculate it as a coincidence worth remark that twenty-one years afterwards, to the month and to the week, Mr. Ouimet won the great championship.

Many of Mr. Hunnewell's friends were invited to come and attempt the game at his place, which they did accordingly and fell in love with it. He had fashioned a course of seven holes of moderate length over undulating lawns and some park-land. The actual holes consisted of five-inch flower-pots sunk in the turf, and the hazards were avenues, clumps of trees, beds of rhododendrons, an aviary, a greenhouse, and an occasional drawing-room window, as it is facetiously remarked by Mr. Lawrence Curtis, who became the first secretary of the golf committee of the Country Club, and to whose account of these happenings I am indebted for my notes upon them. Mr. Curtis, seeing the fascination that the game exercised upon all who became acquainted with it, wrote a letter to the executive council of the Country Club informing them of it, suggesting that it was a pastime that might very well be brought within the scope of the club, and that the cost of an experimental course need not exceed some fifty dollars. The suggestion was backed by several members and the council agreed, the course being laid out in the spring of the following year. The home hole was placed on a lawn in front of the club-house which was soon discovered to be a very dangerous place for it, so that it had to be removed. Almost immediately the game became a strong attraction at the Country Club, new members came along in droves because of it, and it has flourished ever since. The example of this powerful club was followed at the Essex County Club at Manchester, then just being begun. Mr. Herbert Leeds, now so closely and honourably associated with Myopia, won the Country Club's championship in 1893 with a score for eighteen holes of 109, Mr. Curtis being next with 110; and that summer a Country Club side won a team tournament that was played at Tuxedo against the St. Andrews and Tuxedo Clubs. And afterwards all went very well indeed.

And while I write in this way of the grand pioneering work that was done in those days when champions of the present time were being born and trained, I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Mr. Edward Blackwell, in which he told me of his going out to California in 1886 and staying there for six years. His people had bought some land in those western parts, and he and his two brothers went out there to convert it from barley to a vineyard. Mr. Blackwell is a very great golfer to-day, but considering the gutty ball and circumstances in general, he was, relatively to his contemporaries, as great then. Only about a week before he sailed for California a match was arranged between him and Jack Simpson, who had gained the Open Championship the previous year, and Mr. Blackwell won that match at the last of the thirty-six holes that were played. Out in California there was plenty of hard work to do on the land and good sport with the gun, but, of course, there was no golf. Mr. Blackwell's thoughts frequently turned towards it, and he missed it very much. He considered the possibilities and found that they were practically non-existent, for the country round about was too hopelessly rough for laying out any sort of holes. So he never saw a golf club and never hit a ball during those six years, but for all that he won the King William IV. medal at the autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club immediately on his return. Then he went back to California and did not see club or ball for another five years. Some of us could almost wish he had made some sort of course out there in California and become the first golfer of that far west, for he would have been so good to have been a pioneer, and golf has flourished there exceedingly since then. California sends men to championships. It would have given a special piquancy to that fateful amateur championship final at Sandwich in 1904 when Mr. Blackwell was his country's last hope against America's Mr. Walter Travis, and as it happened he was not quite equal to the occasion, for the American captured four holes at the start with his amazing putting, and he won by as many at the end.

That was a great day for American golf, a kind of consummation it was, and I shall never forget the queer sensation that filled the atmosphere on the St. George's course, nor the dumb feeling, not exactly of dismay but of incomprehension, there was at the end. As to the first of these sensations I believe that nearly everybody felt—without knowing why exactly, for comparatively few had noticed his play until he got to the fourth or fifth rounds and was appreciated as dangerous—that the American player was nearly sure to win, that nothing could stop him from winning. It was a conviction. Certainly Mr. Travis's wonderful putting had created a very deep impression, but if he had been a British player I think the feeling would have arisen that putting like that, which had been continued for the best part of a week, would be sure to give out before the end. Take the case, for instance, of Mr. Aylmer in the championship of 1910 at Hoylake. He had been putting in the most amazing manner all the time, and holing them from everywhere, but nobody had any confidence in his ability to beat Mr. John Ball in the final, and he collapsed utterly. Of course, Mr. Aylmer then had not the tremendous fighting power and pertinacity of Mr. Travis in match play, qualities of their kind which I have only seen equalled by a successor of his in the American championship roll, Mr. Jerome Travers, and to beat Mr. Ball at Hoylake is a different matter from beating Mr. Blackwell at Sandwich. But then they were saying that Mr. Aylmer could not go much farther even when he was only at about the third round, and as for Mr. Ball at Hoylake there was a considerable feeling among golfers about that time that the old champion could not go on defying the law of averages any longer, and that there could be no more championships for him. I confess that I rather shared this view, held in a superstitious sort of way, but now that Mr. John has clapped another championship on to that Hoylake affair, we have given him up. There is no reason why he should not win another eight! However, when the Scot and the American teed up that fateful morning there was a disposition to be sorry for Mr. Blackwell, and a kind of hope that the end might be painless. In the circumstances Mr. Blackwell's performance in losing nothing more after losing four of the first five holes was as good as it could be. He kept the pump working splendidly.

The truth is that he was by no means so gloomy as his friends about his prospects, as he told me afterwards. He said he thought he had a good chance of winning, and did not believe he would get beaten. He wished, however, that the tees had been farther back so that his long driving would have given him a better advantage. Two things about his opponent impressed him very much, one, of course, being his astonishing putting and the other his silence. But then, of course, one does not work one's way into a final of a championship for conversational purposes, or for debating the merits of the sixth sub-section of one of the rules of golf. When the deed was done completely Mr. Blackwell joined the converts who departed from the old prejudice and raided Tom Vardon's shop for Schenectady putters, with which they practised, and marvelled as the sun was setting on the first day that any but a British player had won a British golf championship. With that victory the first era in modern American golf, not counting the prehistoric times of golf in Charleston and the Indians' games, came to an end. America had made good. Now she became a power.

The second era lasted nine years and was one in which she gradually came to be taken more seriously. She suffered a set-back of sorts when Mr. Harold Hilton won the American Amateur Championship at Apawamis in 1911, but there were some circumstances attending that victory at the thirty-seventh hole which were rather galling to the Americans, and they behaved well in saying so little about them. Mr. Hilton ran away with the match in the final, as it appeared, and Mr. Fred Herreshoff in the afternoon was offered about the most forlorn hope that golfer ever had to lighten his way for him. He brightened it up and made it thoroughly serviceable, and was distinctly unlucky in being beaten at the extra tie hole when Mr. Hilton's bad second shot cannoned off the famous rock to the right and went kindly to the putting green instead of getting into a hopeless place. It has been said that even if Mr. Hilton's shot was lucky, Mr. Herreshoff played the hole so badly that he hardly deserved to win it even if he was hardly treated by losing. But it is forgotten that it was match play, and that what one man does affects the other's game, and Mr. Herreshoff told me once, long after, that the American crowd, which is supposed erroneously to be many shots to the advantage of an American playing against an Englishman, on that occasion misled and upset him. It cheered for Mr. Hilton at the wrong time and for the wrong thing, and led to Mr. Herreshoff making a hash of a most fateful stroke. This era of American golf came to an end with the amazing victory by Mr. Ouimet at Brookline.

The present state of things is very remarkable, and I have found the study of it very interesting during two long golfing expeditions through the United States, when I have visited many of the chief American clubs, met and made friends with men who are at the head of American golf and the most distinguished players, and in every way gained a good practical knowledge of the amazing progress of the game in this country. The Englishman who visits America and is not a golfer suffers a loss that he must regret always afterwards. To strangers in general the Americans in their own country are kindly and hospitable. That touch of carelessness and arrogance which is sometimes noticed in the wandering American when he is "doing Europe" is not in evidence among good Americans when they are at home, always provided that the Englishman has the good sense and manners—which one regrets to say is not always the case—to remember that when in the house of his host it is not good taste to praise his own for its superiority in divers ways. Pay the American now and then, and with proper delicacy, that little compliment that is so very well deserved about the magnificence of his achievement in making a country like that in such a short space of time, and about the excellence of many of his established systems. It is a compliment that can and should be paid with the most absolute sincerity. The American has the right to be proud of his own country, and we should be proud of the American, for that his blood is much the same as ours—trite observations, no doubt, but commonly disregarded. Then with all his fancy hustle and his tarnation smartness, the American is at bottom rather a sentimental man (perhaps it is because he has to be so very businesslike most times that he is liable to a sharp reaction at any good chance) and he is touched with signs of genuine good feeling towards him and an appreciation of what he has done. Thereupon in a softened voice he will tell of his weaknesses, and of his appreciation of the greatness of mother England, and he will play the host in a more thorough and warm-hearted way than any other man on earth will or can. The ordinary non-golfing visitor may find out many of these things, and have his own good time in his simple way, but even in the freest countries there are often social omissions, accidents, and disasters when there is not good common ground for meeting and friends in waiting, and it is very possible to go to America and fail in the way of holiday. The man who visits as a golfer, enters at once into joys of existence and the most friendly companionship. I have visited clubs in many parts of the country, and have made good and abiding friends among countless golfers, and it is but a poor expression of my feelings to say that I am very appreciative and deeply grateful. If, therefore, for anything whatever I should criticise the golf of the country I hope that American golfers will believe that in my comments there is no trace of adverse prejudice.

It is difficult to estimate how many players of this game there are in the country at the present time, and whatever figures were fixed upon would soon be made inaccurate through the rapid increase that is going on all the time—more rapid by far than is the case in Britain. I have seen it estimated that there are six or seven hundred clubs in the States at the present time, with a total membership of about a hundred and fifty thousand. The Americans say that they will double their golfing population in the next five years.

§

It is impossible for a person who has not crossed the Atlantic to imagine the United States as the country and people really are. I found it easier to imagine Italy and Spain and oriental Morocco before ever I went to those places, than I did to conceive a picture of the country and the life of our own blood relations in this new America. All the fraternising with Americans in London and elsewhere, our reading of their newspapers and their books, printed in the words of our own language, pictures and photographs of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, of the sky-scrapers in the background and the Fifth Avenue that glitters on a summer's day, all the pictures of Boston and Washington, or of the boulevards and business activities of Chicago, will not help any one to preconceive those places exactly. The atmosphere and the life and the ways of the people are a little beyond the imagination of the untravelled western man. In the same way I do not think that British golfers who have not been to the United States can understand the American's present-day attitude towards the game; certainly those who have not been to America should not judge upon it as they are often inclined to do. It is good, sound, and in its every aspect it is exceedingly interesting.

Wandering through the country I have visited many clubs and courses. If we would have much golf in America we must move quickly as the Americans do, and think as little of travelling all night as they think, for it would be too much waste of time to make the long journeys that have to be made by precious daylight. As a rule the golfer at home protests against being asked to play anything like his best game after a night in a railway train. I remember Mr. H. E. Taylor, who is not possessed of the strongest constitution in the world, told me that he had set off from Charing Cross one morning in the winter, arrived at Cannes in the south of France at breakfast time on the next morning, cleaned himself and put on his golfing shoes, and then gone along to the golf course out at La Napoule to win a scratch gold medal. Again I recall that Mr. Hilton once travelled all night from Hoylake to Muirfield and broke the record of the course there on arrival, playing two more rounds the same day. However, men like these are exceptions to most rules.

But a golfer may cure himself of more of his weaknesses and susceptibilities than he may think he can—all that are imaginary and not really of the temperament. A man who hates wind and avoids it would learn to play well and bravely in it if he had always to take his golf on an exposed part of the eastern coast. The ability or otherwise to play in wind is largely a matter of temperament. So it is with the journeys. I had either to golf, and golf for me tolerably well, in the intervals of scampering from one part of the country to the other, or I had to spoil the whole expedition. I managed it somehow.

Arriving in New York for the first time early on a Sunday morning, I fixed myself up at my appointed quarters, rang up a golfer on the telephone, and then, according to arrangement, proceeded to track a man down at his club on the Fifth Avenue with the object of playing in the afternoon. I walked into Fifth Avenue from a cross street, and my first glimpse of it is one that will not soon be forgotten. It was a glorious morning, the sun shining hot and white, and New York, for the only time in its hustling week, was comparatively quiet. There was no traffic and few people just then in the Fifth Avenue, quite one of the most majestic and wonderful thoroughfares in the world despite its plain simplicity. But it was not the whiteness, not the glittering cleanliness, not the real splendour of this Fifth Avenue with all its newness, that struck the first impression on my mind. Upon the moment that this wandering British player of the most meditative of games emerged from somewhere round about West 36th or 37th, into the big avenue, there whizzed along it, right in front, a motor funeral which was doing a fine fifty miles an hour clip along the smooth and open thoroughfare. There was just the hearse with glass panels, the coffin plainly exhibited inside, and the chauffeur on the seat, with another man beside him who might have been a mourner. Holding life a little more cheaply in America than we do, they grieve a little less for those who lose it, which is not to say that they are heartless or unsympathetic, but more practical. This funeral, done with petrol instead of horses, was positively going north at the rate of fifty miles an hour. It was moving just as fast as I saw any car ever go in the United States, and I could not help reflecting that the spirit of the good American, viewing the last journey of its separated corpus, must feel a certain satisfaction that it was hustlingly done and that no time was wasted. Finis coronat opus! Inspired, I played on two different courses in New York on the same afternoon.

§

English people hear much about railroad travelling being far better in the United States than it is in our own country. It is—and it is not. The comfort and conveniences of the cars in the daytime are much in advance of anything we have. The men's smoking cars, the observation cars, the parlour cars, are delightful and enable us thoroughly to enjoy the journeys. Although they standardise so many things in America, they cease their standardisations when considerations of personal comfort and peculiarities have to be considered. It never occurred to me until I travelled my first thousand miles in America that it is a hardship that, no matter what our girth may be, nor the length of our bodies and legs, we must all of us at home, though we pay for our first-class accommodation, sit in standardised seats which are all the same and attached to each other. In the American railroad car running on a long-distance journey there are seats of different sorts, some are high and some are low, and they are detached. This makes much difference. In the dining-cars the tables and chairs are all loose, and one does not have to squeeze into them with the feeling that one is being locked into one's place as we do in England. And the dining arrangements on the American cars are far superior to what they are elsewhere. But if the American system gains by day the British system makes up for much of the lost comfort at night, and that is when the American, golfer and non-golfer, does most of his long-distance travelling. The Pullman day cars are converted into sleepers by the dark-skinned attendants (uncommonly good railroad car servants these niggers make), and by an almost magical transformation the lounging car is made into a sleeper with about two dozen berths, a dozen on each side, half uppers and half lowers, and an alley down the middle. The chief difference between the upper berths and the lower is that the uppers have to be reached by a short stepladder and are not convenient to fat, gouty, or unathletic persons, while those who wake early and like to look upon the prairie, or what once was that, have a window at the bottom as the people in the top have not. The berths are covered in with thick green curtains which button together. We may leave our boots outside for the attendant to brush in the morning, but our other clothes and traps must go along to bed with us, and be stowed away at the bottom of the berth, or in the little netting that hangs alongside. And here I must timidly state in evidence that there are not separate cars for the sexes; in America all go together, and the ladies and the men occupy the same cars. The ladies generally go off to bed earlier than the men. Whether they do or not, we all climb into our respective berths, fasten up the curtains, and undress in the very limited space at our disposal, a process which seems to me must be the same as that by which acrobatic performers wriggle themselves out of chains and ropes with which their limbs and bodies have been tied up fast. After a time we become expert. What is most difficult to become accustomed to is the horrible jolting, and the painfully sudden stopping of the trains in the middle of the night. Their permanent ways are not laid so finely as the magnificent lines along our coasts from London to Scotland. Their rails are not fixed in chairs laid on the sleepers, but are pinned down straight on to the wood. This makes much difference. The cars shake exceedingly. Then the drivers at night have to be wary and stop quickly at times, and no doubt they do right not to reduce their speed gradually for the sake of the men and women who are asleep behind them, but instead to stop with a suddenness that could only be improved upon by a collision. However, I say again, that we find ourselves accustomed to it all in time.

I shall not forget my first experience of a thousand-mile golfing journey from the New York Central Station to Chicago. A few golfers were in a party going westward for the championship at Wheaton in Illinois, and we discussed the game from the time of starting in the late afternoon until we had passed Albany, about ten, when we moved into our sleeping quarters. My bag of clubs had to go to bed with me, and they lay alongside all the night; there was no room for them underneath. I had to sleep with one hand on the bag to prevent them from attacking me or going overboard into the avenue, so much did that wretched train rattle and shake as it hurtled its way through the darkness, with the big bell in the front of the engine jangling mournfully all the time. And what a wild, sad note it is that is struck by the bells on these American engines, suggestive of the loneliness of the open country through which they speed, now and then making a big noise with a sort of foghorn. I am much attached to my clubs, and they are the chosen favourites of a vast number that go with their master everywhere, and are carefully watched and tended, but the intimacy that was sprung upon us then was too much, and I invented another arrangement for the next travelling night. James Braid, very wise man indeed, tells me that long, deep nights of placid slumber are the best things in the world for the golfer who would keep steady his hands and nerves and clear his eyes so that he may play the best game of which he is capable. But no British golfer could sleep at the beginning of his American experiences in such circumstances. I was just falling into some sort of a doze in the small hours of the morning when the train pulled up sharply at a station which I discovered to be Schenectady, where the famous putter that disturbed the peace of two nations was born. Next, one realised that we were within a mile or two of the Niagara Falls, and so on with jolting and banging and sudden stopping all the night. By and by daylight came and then we had a long day of travelling through the heart of America to Chicago.

Some may suggest that all this about railroad travelling in the country where there is more of it than any other has little to do with golf, but it has all to do with it, for the thorough golfer in America, whether a citizen or British, must needs spend a large part of his time in the train, and if he would have the maximum amount of golf, much sleeping must be done behind the green curtains in the darkened cars. The travelling done by the American golfer, therefore, is a surprising thing, but a few months of it is a fine and valuable experience for the British golfer afterwards. No longer, since I have been across the Atlantic, do I consider it a far way from London to the links of Dornoch. St. Andrews and North Berwick have come pleasingly near to me. All the world has shrunk, and I feel I have my foot on every course—or soon may have.

Though it be a thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and these are the two great golfing centres of the east and west, it is a fact, as I know well, that the golfers in the two places visit each other for a weekend's golf almost as frequently and with as little fuss as would be the case with golfers in London who go down to Sandwich. They take the "Twentieth Century Limited" from New York on Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning they are at Chicago. They flash out on a local train to Onwentsia, Midlothian, Glen View, Wheaton, Exmoor, or one of those places, play all day, start play again at eight o'clock on Sunday, finish their couple of rounds early in the afternoon, catch the fast train back to New York, and are at their office on Monday morning as if they had spent the week-end pottering about the garden. I am not concerned with the question as to whether they are prolonging their lives by these acts; nor are they concerned. In the meantime they appear to be in the best of health, and are certainly in the highest of spirits.

§

With this talk of journeys we seem in fancy to be in Chicago now, so let us consider the leading club of the busy district in the heart of America. The course of the Chicago club is at Wheaton, some twenty-five miles out on the North Western line, and this is the foremost club of the Central States, and west in the sense of being west of the east, for all golfing America is divided into two parts, the east and the west, Chicago being the capital of and held chiefly to represent the west, which holds some close rivalry with the east, where New York is headquarters. The west out California way is just the far and other west, and is in another world. The Chicago club is exclusive and dignified. The most solid men in the city support it, and they see that everything is good. It is not an ancient institution, but it has some of the characteristics of solidity and strength of age and sound experience. Chicago is not an old city, but, as the proud citizens like to tell you, about a hundred years ago there was no Chicago at all, but just a few wigwams of Indians and some huts and things round about a creek. Since then the place has been once burnt down, and yet it is now the fourth largest city of the world, while in its tenseness of commercial industry it is the foremost of all. If all the ages past in Chicago only amount to a hundred years, then one-fifth of all time as known to Chicago history, which represents the life of the Chicago Golf Club, is comparatively long indeed.

In 1892 a small golf club was started for the first time round about Lake Forest, but the promoters had only about sixteen acres of ground. In the following year, when the World's Fair was held, a number of foreign visitors were in Chicago and asked for golf, as travellers will do, though the great golf boom had not yet then set in. Mr. Charles B. Macdonald came in with the movement, ground was searched for, and the Chicago Golf Club was organised at Belmont, some twenty-two miles out of the city. When the Fair was over in the following spring, only about twenty members were left to the club, and the outlook did not seem splendid. But once begun, in either place or man, golf is a very hard thing to kill. The twenty die-hards asked their friends to come and see the place and try the game. They did so, and those men of Chicago knew at once that they had discovered the real thing. A hundred and thirty members were quickly obtained. The inevitable result followed. They wanted more and better golf, and they wanted it to belong to them and not to be on leased ground, so in 1894 the club met and authorised the purchase of two hundred acres at Wheaton, twenty-four miles out from the city, a fine course was laid out, a splendid club-house was built, and a really great club was established. Here and now we may gain a very fair idea of the difference in cost to the player between American golf and British. No better club could be selected for the purpose of exemplification than this one. It so happened that a few days before I arrived there, its club-house was burnt down, with all its contents and appurtenances, and from the wreck only a single one of the club-books of rules and regulations was rescued. I took possession of it while I made some notes upon the terrace of the only part of the building that was saved.

The first paragraph in the book, being Section 1 of Article 1 of the bye-laws, states that "this club is incorporated under the laws of Illinois as Chicago Golf Club, and its corporate seal is a circular disc bearing the words, 'Chicago Golf Club,' the figure of a golf player, and the motto, 'Far and Sure.'" To become a member of the club the applicant must be over eighteen years of age; he must have not more than one adverse vote cast against him by the governing body; and he must pay an entrance fee of not less than a hundred dollars or £20. The resident (or full) membership of the club is limited to 225, and the annual subscription is 75 dollars or £15, half of which is payable at the beginning of the year and half at midsummer. Now this subscription is much higher than that of any golf club in Great Britain, and the fact is only partly attributable to the circumstance that everything in America is more expensive than it is in England. The higher subscription is necessitated because the membership is kept down so low as 225, and that is done in order that there may be no overcrowding of the course. In England such a club, being situated within thirty miles of a great city and having the best course round about, would probably admit at least five or six hundred members, with the result that on the fine and busy week-end days the course would be hopelessly blocked and there would be no pleasure for anybody. This is certainly so in the case of two or three of the most popular clubs in the outer London golfing area, and one may come to a speedy decision that in this matter the American way is by far the better. Ladies who are over sixteen years of age and the immediate relatives of a member are permitted to have the privileges of the course, subject to the rules of the Green Committee, on payment of ten dollars a year. There is another class, "summer members," who are not to exceed fifteen in number, and who pay 150 dollars for one summer season's play. There is practically no play in the winter, the climatic conditions being too severe. The other rules as to membership are much the same as those which obtain in the case of British golf clubs.

Among the "house rules," it is stated that the club-house generally will remain open until midnight, and the café, which is the British equivalent of the smoke-room with bar, until one o'clock in the morning, which is a lateness of hour almost unheard of in England, but then it has to be remembered that such club-houses in America are mostly residential. "Juniors" are not allowed in the café. The warning is given that smoking and the lighting of matches in the locker or dressing room are absolutely prohibited, and that a fine of ten dollars will be imposed on any member violating this rule. Fires in club-houses in America being so numerous is the cause of this rule, which is rigorously applied. Then it is perceived that no member makes any payment whatsoever in cash in the club-house. He signs a check or bill, an account of his expenditure is kept, and it is served to him fortnightly. Payment must then be made within ten days, failing which the member is suspended. Some interesting items are to be found among the ground rules. One says that in medal play competitions new holes must be assumed to have been made on the morning of a competition, unless otherwise stated by the Green Committee; and another that a member playing a round, and keeping score other than in club competition must allow parties playing pure match-play to pass. The Americans are not content with merely requesting a player to replace the divots of turf that he cuts up in play. They say: "Divots of turf cut up by players must be carefully replaced and pressed down. A fine of one dollar will be imposed on any member violating this rule. All members are earnestly requested to report any member who violates this rule to the Green Committee." Caddies are paid "from the time of their employment until the time they are discharged, to be determined by an electric clock, at such rate per hour as may be determined by the Green Committee." There is nothing that is inexpensive about a club of this class, and let it be understood that there are few second-class golf clubs in the States where the fees are small. A day's golf at a good club is cheap indeed at five dollars. When one goes to stay there for a night or two one finds that the statutory price for breakfast is a dollar, for lunch 1.25, and for dinner 1.30 upwards. When I returned to England it appeared that golf and all pertaining to it was cheap, almost to the gift point.

The course at Wheaton is good, although there are some in America that are better. It is plain, its holes sometimes lack strength, but it is well tended and its putting greens are quite perfect. Its fairway is not perfect, any more than the fairways of other American courses are. The climate will hardly permit of their being so. It bakes them up and makes them hard, and the inevitable result is little knobs and depressions which give cuppy lies, and turf which for all its greenness is not by any means comfortable to the feet in comparison with the yieldingness of our British turf. The Americans cannot help this; if it were practicable to treat every inch of their turf for climatic troubles all through the day and night they would perhaps do it. It is practicable to treat their putting greens thoroughly, and the result is that, taking them all round, they have undoubtedly got the best putting greens in the world. I mean, without reservation, that the average of the best courses in America is higher than the average of the best in our own country, and I say it with some regret that they have a score of courses in the United States with greens far superior to those on the old course at St. Andrews the last time the Amateur Championship was played there, those greens being then not what they used to be. I think much of the credit for the high quality of the greens at Wheaton is due to the splendid work of David Foulis, the professional and greenkeeper there. Need I say that David is a Scot, and a very true Scot too, who still loves his old homeland better than any other, and is glad when the wandering golfer from it gets his way. Chicago may seem a strange place to visit for facts of old golf history, and yet here I added some details to the histories of the people and their golfing ways of fifty years and more agone, for Foulis has his father living with him out in Illinois, and Foulis the elder was at work with old Tom Morris in the great days when the Open Championship was young, and stirring are the stories that he can tell you, as he did to me in David's shop, of old Tom and Allan Robertson, and the other giants of those times, carrying one in mind and spirit far away from the land round about the big lake of Michigan to the old grey city which was old more than a hundred years ago.

I took away with me as a memento from David Foulis a club that he has invented, and which for a special purpose I can commend. It is a kind of mashie niblick, David claiming to be the inventor of this type of club, but it is different from others in that it has a perfectly straight, flat sole and a concave face. I, like others, found that by the use of this club I saved some dollars, for it enabled me to pitch the ball from a hard lie on to the hard greens and make it stay close to the hole when nothing else would serve the purpose. The ordinary mashie niblick with curved sole is not perfect for baked and iron-hard courses, as it is not easy to get well hold of the ball when taking it cleanly as must often be done in such circumstances, and the margin for error is painfully small. The flat-soled club is essentially one for taking the ball cleanly, and somehow that hollow face does impart extra backspin to the ball. It lifts it up and drops it dead as no other club that I have handled will of itself ever do.

But let me write that the Americans are not given to fancy and freak clubs as some people suppose they are. There is nothing freakish about this article of which I write, and for the most part the implements that the American players employ are the simplest. And just to complete my generalising remarks on American courses, which naturally vary greatly, let me say that commonly they are not so severely bunkered as are the best of ours, particularly from the tee. They do not demand either such long or such straight driving as our best courses do, and I think that the Americans realise now that this is the case and that they need stiffening up. They are doing that already. There are some very good holes at Wheaton, and the short hole at the ninth is about the most tantalising water hole I have encountered. It is all water from the teeing ground to the foot of a high plateau on which the green is situated, and it is about a hundred and ten yards across the pond.

CHAPTER VII

THE PERFECT COUNTRY CLUB AND THE GOLFERS' POW-WOW AT ONWENTSIA, WITH A GLIMPSE OF THE NATIONAL LINKS.

Round Chicago there is now a great belt of golf which is thickening rapidly. More hundreds of acres are being claimed for the game constantly, and one hears in these parts of the most splendidly equipped club-houses being built to replace others at the cost of very many thousands of dollars. Activity in the increase of golf is feverish. But even here maturity has its charm, as it always must have in golf, and the most delightful resorts in Illinois are those which are the oldest. Such as Onwentsia, Exmoor, Midlothian, Glen View are excellent.

I am glad I went to Onwentsia. Most British golfers who have never been and will never go across the Atlantic have heard something, even if but the name, of the Onwentsia club. It seems to suggest American golf, and there is a look of some mystery about the name. Onwentsia is by no means like the others, and there are good reasons why. Here on a wall of mine are two feathers of eagles fastened crosswise; below them an Indian's pipe of peace with its silken tassel. They were sent to me across the sea from Onwentsia by some members a while after I had been there, and they are a reminder not only of happy days but of the characteristics of Onwentsia, for the name of the place is an Indian one. Here were the redskins before all others, and then the white men and golfers came, and still it is almost as if the soil were redolent of the Indian trail. The club perpetuates in a manner considered suitable the memory and legend of the braves; my eagles' feathers are such as a "Running Driver" or "Mighty Mashie" might have worn in their fighting days, and they adorned our modern Onwentsians on the day of their Indian feast! Let me explain. Lake Forest, where is Onwentsia, is a very charming suburb of Chicago, at the side of Lake Michigan. Its name suggests its character; it is well wooded, and one of the kind friends that I made there, Mr. Slason Thompson, drove me in his car in the dusk of a balmy evening for miles through the beautiful public grounds. The Onwentsia Club, as it is called, is a close fraternity of the best people of these parts. It is a country club in a large sense. It is a hunt club, it is a polo club with a splendid ground, it is a tennis club, and it is a golf club, and it need hardly be said that the golf is a very strong feature, the predominator of the institutions. Now the Onwentsian golfers, zealous and good, have their own manners and customs, and, particularly they have one custom which has a fame all over America, and it has spread even beyond the seas. If it be not sin to mention them together Onwentsia has one great day of celebration as the Royal and Ancient Club has one. Towards the end of September the Royal and Ancient Club calls its members together for the autumn gathering at St. Andrews, and there on that occasion, as has been related, many ancient and solemn ceremonies of great dignity are performed. The captain "plays himself in," guns are fired, in the evening at the banquet new members kiss the silver club and swear their loyalty, and much more in that splendid and time-honoured way is done. America is true to St. Andrews golf in its law, but Lake Forest, far out toward the west, is not the same as Fifeshire, and the Onwentsia Club at Lake Forest is not like the Royal and Ancient. It is not a question of which is the better; they are different, and when I was in Illinois, at any rate, Onwentsia was to me a very entertaining place. And I do not say this merely because Onwentsia, near to Lake Michigan, is so charmingly situated; because the club is such a delightful place, perfect in equipment, with a luxurious club-house, and inside it a huge swimming pool and many shower-baths, making one sometimes a trifle regretful upon the bareness of our British golfing-houses. It is just because when I first reached there the great golfing gathering at St. Andrews was nearly due and the golfers at Onwentsia were having theirs. When I dined with Mr. Thompson that evening at his charming house overlooking the great lake, and we smoked cigars on the lawn overhanging it, he told me why on everything that concerned the club there was the same sign, the head of an Indian brave with the big feather in it, and why they were just going forward to the great annual pow-wow. If you would do it properly you should pronounce Onwentsia in the soft, crooning Indian way. Murmur it slowly and gently, and mount the cadence high upon the second syllable; then, after a suspicion of a pause, lower the notes gradually to the end. If you said it in the right way an old Iroquois brave would know that you were referring to "a country gathering," for that is the meaning of the term. In days of old the Iroquois trailed over all these parts where now the course is laid. Here were their wigwams; here lingered their squaws with the little papoose, while the red men hunted and fought. That is why the golfers of Onwentsia have their pow-wow once a year.

The pow-wow is an invitation golf tournament lasting two days, and it is open only to those members who are of a certain age or over (it was thirty-nine when I was there) and their guests, one guest per member. In order to preserve complete the familiar friendliness of the gathering and to maintain its traditions undisturbed by new influences, the age limit is increased from year to year to keep the new and young men out. The call to the pow-wow, which is written anew for every festival, gives us the key to the nature of the function, and I quote from one of them:

On the banks of Skokie water,
By the water flecked with golf balls,
Stands the wigwam, the Onwentsia,
The great wigwam of the Pow-wow.
Come ye forth, ye Jol-li-gol-fas,
Come ye forth and come ye quickly
To Onwentsia, the big wigwam,
To Onwentsia, the big Pow-wow,
In the Moon of Falling Leaflets,
Ere the trees are red with autumn,
Come in trains, the Puf-choo-choo-puf;
Come in motors, Aw-to-bub-buls;
In the 'bus, old Shuh-too-get-thah,
To Onwentsia, to the Pow-wow.
Here's the bartend, Wil-lin-mix-ah,
The head waitress, Goo-too-loo-kat,
The great golfer, Hoo-beets-boh-ghee,
And the caddy, Skip-an-fetch-it,
Waiting all to do you honour.
Leave your war club, Tom-ah-haw-kus,
Bring the peace sticks, Dri-vah-nib-lix;
Leave your toilsome reservations
And the dust of smoky cities
For the Pow-wow in the wigwam;
Bring the peace pipe, Swee-too-suk-kat,
Taste the bowl, Hi-baw-laf-tah;
Play the game, Roy-al-skoch-wun,
All the morning in the sunlight,
All the afternoon, till evening
Spreads the feast of squab and chicken
'Mid the joy of good companions
Gathered in the spreading wigwam
Of Onwentsia for the Pow-wow.

Lasting for two days, with one great night in between them, it happens that the first session of play is conducted in a state of high anticipation and with much joyful shaking of hands and exhibitions of brotherly attachment, and the second session with a feeling as of a slowly receding past. Only those who attend the feast in the big wigwam are eligible to play in the numerous competitions to which are attached such an abundance of prizes that it is difficult for the golfing brave to go empty-handed back to his gentle squaw. A law indeed has had to be made that he shall not take more than two of the trophies away with him.

At eight o'clock on the morning of the first day the play begins. There is a thirty-six holes medal competition for the Sum-go-fah trophy (the "Indian" titles are changed from year to year), and at the end of eighteen holes the numerous competitors are grouped into sections of eight, according to the place in the returns—first eight, second eight, and so on for separate match-play competitions for the Sko-ki-ko-lah prizes. The prize for the first eight is the Mis-sa-sko-kih, for the second the O-ma-go-li, for the third the Hit-ta-sko-kih, for the fourth the Sti-mi-gosh, for the fifth the Bum-put-tah, for the sixth the Went-an-mis-tit, for the seventh the Top-an-sli-sah, for the eighth the Let-mih-tel-you, and for the ninth the Dub-an-duf-fah. Then there is a competition for the Bun-kah-bun-kah prize, which is embraced within the Sum-go-fah, being for the best eclectic score made in the two rounds, or "choice score" as they prefer to call it in the States. Two-thirds handicap is allowed. Likewise there is the Noh-bak-num-bah prize, which is by medal play with an age handicap, the handicap being determined by the years of the contestant above or below forty. By such play, whether it is successful or not, do the braves qualify for the feast, and at half-past seven there is the call to the big and happy wigwam. The great dining-room is indeed made by fitting and decoration to appear as one great wigwam, and there are some of the adjuncts of the life of the old Iroquois. The golfing braves stride eagerly, joyfully, chatteringly in. Reddened are the golfers' faces; wrapped around them are their blankets, from their hair stick big black feathers; long pipes of peace are held before them. Then there are strange but toothsome dishes; they taste the "Hi-baw-laf-ta-tah"; happiness and contentment increase; there are toasts and shouts and whoops. The successors of the Iroquois hold their pow-wow well. At the beginning of the morning, when the moon is riding through the fleecy heavens of Illinois, softly they steal away, and in the distance now and then there may be heard the same lone cry that once resounded through the forest when Iroquois were on the trail. But at nine in the morning more competitions begin, and are most thoroughly attended. There are tournaments for the Bus-tis-tik-sah, the Boo-li-bus-tah, the Strok-a-hol-ah, the Heez-noh-mut-sah, the Ho-pu-get-it, the Get-sa-loo-kin, the He-za-pee-chah, the Wil-lin-loo-sah, the Oh-you-papoose, and other cups. Some of the prizes go to the players doing certain holes in the lowest gross score during the tournament, the Wil-lin-loo-sah is captured by the man who does the four rounds worst of all on the two days, and an Onwentsia medicine pouch, the nature of which may be guessed by golfers with little difficulty, remembering British practice, is awarded to the brave who does a particular hole in one stroke. It is all very remarkable, wonderful, interesting, and thoroughly American, and not the ragged corner of a paper dollar the worse for it either. Happy Onwentsia!

§

At the Glen View Country Club they have a special autumn festival also which has a character of its own. The motto of Glen View is "Laigh and lang"—low and long—which is a good variation on the monotonous "far and sure." And about Glen View there is a Scottish flavour; in manners and customs for a very brief season in the golden days of the fall there is wafted from the far distant Highlands a breath of Scotland. Here they call their festival the "Twa Days," and it is carried through with a fine spirit. There are competitions in number and kind to satisfy everybody, and the social side of the affair is excellent.

Glen View, again, is not like the others either. I spent some days there as the guest of the club, and nowhere have I had a more pleasurable time. It came after an exceedingly strenuous, rushing period at other places, and towards the end of one of the hottest spells of weather that they had known for many summers in those burning parts. Glen View is a pretty name, but it is not prettier than the golf course there, which is one of the most charming I know. It reminded one in some ways of Sudbrook Park in the early summer, always, as I think, one of the most delightful inland courses in the south of England; but Glen View, with its sleepy streams, is nicer. It may not be up to "championship standard" in its architectural features, but it might be made so. Yet if such a change would remove much of the character of Glen View, I, in my selfishness, knowing that on some future morning I shall again take the 9.35 from Chicago on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, and alight at the station which is called "Golf," hope for my high pleasure that there will be none such made. When a club once becomes infatuated with the championship idea its contentment and happiness depart, and Glen View is best as it is. The holes have character. The greens are placed in the most beautiful nooks and corners, great belts of trees surround the course, and a stream winds snake-like through the grounds. At about every third hole there is a large barrel which is filled every morning with fresh spring water, into which a large block of ice is placed. When you play in a shade temperature of nearly a hundred degrees, as I have done at this place, you appreciate these barrels. They have a natty way of naming their holes at Glen View. The first is called "The Elm," the second "High Ball," the third "Sleepy Hollow," and the next in order are "Polo," "Lover's Lane," "Old Hickory," "The Round Up," "Trouble," "Reservoir," "Westward Ho!" "The Grove," "Sunset," "The Bridge," "The Roost," "Spookey," "The Orchard," "Log Cabin," and "Sweet Home." The course is 6279 yards long, and every one of these yards is a pleasure to play along. Visitors do like this place. In one year recently there were 3550 of them who paid a dollar a day for the privilege of playing. The members of the club pay one hundred dollars a year subscription, and nowadays it costs about five hundred dollars for admission. Every member must be the possessor of a hundred-dollar share in the club, and these shares are now at a premium of about five times their par value. At few other places in the golfing world is there such a nicely appointed club-house as there is here. One could put two or three of the largest dining-rooms that our golf clubs possess into the one of Glen View, and the furnishing is finely and tastefully done in a Flemish style. Some of the golfing prints with which we are most familiar hang upon the walls. Other pictures of value keep them company, and there is a large crayon drawing done on the spot by my old friend, the late Tom Browne, who once came here with his bag of clubs.

The café at the Glen View club is an interesting institution. The club has one of the cleverest cocktail mixers in America, and the printed list of available liquid refreshments that is laid upon the tables suggests a little consideration. The American golfers, for the most part, do not drink very much, and what they do drink has little effect upon them, thanks to the heat and much perspiration; but they do like novelties and the variety. So on this list—which, mind you, includes no wines, which are quoted on a separate sheet—there are scheduled no fewer than 147 different kinds of refreshments. There are thirteen "soft drinks," eight different lemonade mixtures, eleven sorts of mineral waters, thirteen beers and ales, six rye whiskies, seven Bourbon whiskies, eleven Scotch and Irish whiskies, thirteen varieties of cocktails, two "toddies," three "sours," three "rickies," three "cobblers," six "fizzes," two "flips," seven "punches," three "smashes," and thirty-six "miscellaneous." The last is a most interesting section. It includes the "Prairie Oyster," the "Millionaire," the "Pousse l'Amour," the "Sam Ward," the "Russian Cooler," the "Japanese Cooler," the "Golfer's Delight," the "Angel's Dream," the "Ladies' Puff," and the "Glen View High Ball." Nearly all of these cost twenty or twenty-five cents each.

One may be most pleasurably lazy at Glen View. The club-house has some forty bedrooms, with a fine equipment of shower and other baths, and the usual telephone service to all the bedrooms with a complete telephone exchange downstairs. The service and comfort are as good as they can be. I liked the lounges and the shady verandahs, with rocking-chairs to tip one away to a short dream on a hot afternoon of purling brooks on English hills and woods in Wales. Yet when I awake I am satisfied. There is no hurry here. In the mornings one would hear the men rising at six o'clock and splashing themselves about in the bath department, and generally becoming very active all at once. Some time later I would join them at breakfast, and see them depart very early for their businesses at Chicago. When they had gone one could settle down, and there were ladies to chatter with or to play Chopin or something else on the piano. It is necessary to take things a little easily during the early and hot part of the day, because soon in the afternoon the men come back from Chicago, and they are all energy and rush as if they had not spent a howling morning in the "Pit" or one of the other great business centres. One has to fall in with their schemes of activity, which endure until the evening meal, taken in an easy way of en famille in the restaurant of the club, luscious green corn to begin with and the most appetising dishes later, with laughter and gossip always. And later in the evening David Noyes and I might sit in the dark on the verandah, and under those stars of Illinois speak of the differences between English people and the Americans as we respectively saw them. We understood each other and could be frank. "The worst of America," said I, "is that it has no soul, and the Americans have none either." "Well," said he; "but we have big hearts." Agreed. He is a leading broker in the "Pit" at Chicago, the great wheat market of the world, and one morning he took me there and I met many golfers I knew round about those four screeching masses of men who make of this place a babel and such an exhibition of raw fighting human nature as, with all its differences, I can only compare with the same brilliant and yet ugly show that is made in the rooms of the Casino at Monte Carlo. It is raw life on the strain at both places—hot seething life. The reposeful Glen View is needed for the people who barter there.

§

Massachusetts is a fine golfing land, and it rose to the heights in 1913. After gaiety in New York, and amazement at Chicago, you should go to Boston. And really they who live there have reason for their pride. There is no other town or city in the United States or Canada that has anything like such an English flavour as this in the New England. There are times when we wander along the great thoroughfare, Washington Street, or turn up one of the side avenues like Boylston, that the American idea for a moment ceases to press closely upon us, and when we pass the old churches, wander through historic chambers Georgian in their style, look into the Faneuil Hall, or into the old-fashioned market, or go down to the shipping in the docks where our Boston man will surely take us, that we may see the place of the "tea party," as they call it now, which had vast consequences to the States and England when taxes were made and were rejected—then in the New England we feel the old one there. And, of course, the wandering Englishman is taken out to Bunker Hill as well. Though with all Americans their spirit of independence is an obsession, and it seems sometimes that they like to think of themselves as a new race of people come up out of nothing or from heaven, owing nothing to any other race, yet at Boston I suspect they are a trifle glad that they and their city are not like the others, but are something more English in their way. There is a difference in the atmosphere. A certain ease is possible, a culture is apparent. Streets and shops do not look as if they had been cut out by machinery at the same time that the streets and shops of a dozen other cities were being cut, and all life is not mathematically arranged and standardised. If an American university is not at all like either Oxford or Cambridge, still Harvard is an influence, and Harvard is at Cambridge, a near suburb of Boston. The result of it all is that we feel something of the old atmosphere of home and are stimulated. Boston grows upon us very rapidly. The father of one of my good American friends, Mr. John G. Anderson, who has gone on golfing expeditions with me in England, Scotland, France and the United States, is a Scot with a great love for his home country, and our rambles round old Boston have been of a peculiarly interesting kind. And when in Boston, and the car of a friend comes along to the Touraine in the morning, we throw the clubs in the back of it, and get up with just that feeling of having a sporting day ahead that one develops in the country at home and hardly anywhere else.

There are many courses round about Boston, and there are four of them, all quite different from each other, of which I shall have a clear recollection always. Two have very special places of their own in American golf, one being The Country Club of Brookline already described. Massachusetts itself will not be called a "state" like other states, but is a "commonwealth," and The Country Club is not the Boston Country Club or the Brookline Country Club, but The Country Club, and visitors who would be appreciative and make no faux pas are recommended to keep the point in mind, the reason being that this one, with its charter of incorporation away back in the eighteenth century, was the first of all the country clubs in America, and is dignified accordingly.

They do blow the place up in America when they determine to make a golf course. Forest and rock are of no more hindrance to any idea or scheme than a few daisies might be. I was strongly impressed with this view of things when I was out one day at the Essex County Club at Manchester-by-the-Sea, another of the outer-Boston courses. "Come to golf at Essex in the morning; you will see something of the way in which we do our golf in America that you have never seen before." Such was the substance of an invitation from Mr. George F. Willett, one of the most ardent and admirable leaders of the golfing movement in the Eastern States. So in the morning golf at Essex, twenty miles out of Boston, was the programme of the day, and by half-past ten we were on the first tee preparing to drive from an eminence down towards low land in front. The terms of the invitation were amply justified. Towards noon, when we might be somewhere about the thirteenth or fourteenth hole, a great roar and crashing sound came from the other side of the course in the locality of the fifth hole, and looking towards it there was to be seen a rising cloud of smoke, with masses of earth and splintered rocks being hurled high into the air. A moment later and there was another deafening bang and more earth, more rocks, and various stumps of trees were shot up towards the sky. Bang! bang! bang!—ten times in the space of a few seconds was this surprise repeated, and it began to seem that we must be on Olympian links and that Jove himself or Hercules was bunkered. "It's only Ross's men tinkering away at the new fourth," said my man unconcernedly, as he ran down a long putt. A couple of minutes afterwards we rounded a bend of the course, and as we did so some wild yells were heard and a number of the Italian workmen were seen running fast in our direction and then stopping suddenly to hide themselves behind trees. Three more big bangs, more smoke, flying earth, flying rocks and roots, and then as my partner played his brassey he soliloquised that he had added, unintentionally, a touch of slice to the stroke and was in the pot on the right. As to the noises, our part of the course, I was assured, was perfectly safe. The three explosions were made by Ross's Italians at the new fifth. Thirteen of them in five minutes was perhaps a little unusual, but they were all over now, and, as could be seen, the Italians, with sundry calls to each other, were moving back towards the place they had sprinted from. The object of this concentration of noise and disturbance in five minutes, it was explained, was to give the full body of workmen plenty to do as soon as they resumed after their midday meal.

The truth is, that golf at Essex, when I was first there, was undergoing a great and most wonderful transformation, regardless of cost, regardless of the magnitude and seeming impossibilities of the task, regardless of everything, but caused by the insatiable desire of the American golfer to have courses that are as good as they can be. To satisfy this desire he is everywhere pulling Nature to pieces and reconstructing her, doing his work deftly and skilfully, and with a good eye for pleasing effect. At the finish you might think that, save for the putting greens and bunkers, it was all the simple work of the mother of earth herself in her gentler moods, smooth swards for rocks, and chaste glades where forests were. This transformation and extension of American golf and the way it is being done is most amazing. All the old courses are being lengthened and greatly improved, and new ones of first-class quality are being made in large numbers. When it is desired to make changes and extensions on a British course the work that has to be done is not generally of a very formidable character. Some tolerably smooth sort of land is frequently available, and alternatives to existing holes may be planned. But even so, the question of expense seems often to be a fearsome thing, and a year or more of thought and yet another year for action are commonly needed. A thousand pounds or two thousand seems to be a mighty sum to spend, but for all that we think that in the south, at all events, we are doing our golf on a very grand scale in these days. And when I think of St. George's Hill and Coombe Hill and others of their kind I know we are doing it on a very fine scale. But the case of America at present is most specially remarkable. In the Eastern States particularly, the courses have had for the most part to be carved out of virgin forests. Tens of thousands of tons of rocks have had to be blasted, and hundreds of acres of swamps drained before the fairways could be laid and sown with grass. Such work is having to be done now for the extensions and improvements, and it is wonderfully done. The committees appear to take about a week to think about it, a day to decide, and then in two or three months, with the help of dynamite, tree-fellers, and hundreds of foreign workmen, the new scheme is carried through. The cost is not considered till afterwards, and then it never worries, but it is enormous. Here at Essex, the chief work that was being done was the addition of a total of 175 yards only to the fourth and fifth holes, which were to be given new numbers, and this little bit of lengthening, with the tree-felling, the splendid draining of a swamp, and the use of 400 lbs. of dynamite on the rocks, was costing 10,000 dollars or £2000. Some other alterations and new constructions were being done, and the course, one of fine undulations, well-planned bunkering, magnificent putting greens, and glorious scenery, was being brought to perfection. The work was being carried out under the direction of Mr. Donald J. Ross, the chief superintendent of the club and course, who was once a Dornoch man. He thinks out his construction schemes in the grand way, and he is going about America blowing hundreds of acres of it up into the air and planting smooth courses upon the levelled remains. Shortly before this, they called him up to a mountainous place at Dixville Notch, in New Hampshire, to plan a new nine-holes course that had to be cut out of solid rock, at a cost of £10,000. No golfer had ever been to that place, and the first had yet to arrive when the promoters wrote hurriedly to Mr. Ross, not long back home, saying: "We are convinced that it will soon be necessary to have a longer course, and are very desirous that you will come at once to lay one out on Panorama Hill." It will cost £20,000, but that does not matter. Golf is demanded everywhere in America, and it must be supplied. A little extra space was required for play by the Rhode Island Country Club at Narragansett, so, with Ross's help they took forty acres from the sea, and are now playing the game where a year previously the waves were rolling. Again, this remarkable golf engineer a little while since finished his work on the very first course that has been laid out in Cuba. I do not know what the future of American golf will be, but its present is a bewildering, astonishing thing.

§

"Yes, but wait until you see Myopia!" I was not glad to leave Essex, but I was happy to go from there to the Myopia Hunt Club a few miles distant (and may I never forget that glorious ride in Mr. Willett's big car, along the winding road fringed with silver birches and autumn-tinted foliage, past placid little lakes, through some of the country of chastest charm in New England!), for Myopia is America's golfing pride. Besides, it is one of the few American courses that have a wide international reputation. Remember the astonishment when Andrew Kirkaldy, a St. Andrews golfer, if ever there was one, a man believing in the old course of Fifeshire as a Mussulman believes in Mecca, came back from an American tour and declared to British people that Myopia was the best course in the world! So we approach one American golf course with wonder and a certain awe. There are other reasons for doing so if we only knew them beforehand. Traditions and old dignity are strongly attached to it, and this Myopia is such a club for high feeling and exclusiveness as would do credit to any institution we have at home, golf or otherwise. It is, at the very least, as difficult to become a member of Myopia as of the Royal and Ancient. If I dared I would say it is more so. Myopia, I am told, will use the black ball with joy when there is a candidate at the doors. It might be easier in some circumstances for a man to become the President of the United States than to become a member of the Myopia Hunt Club. The dignity of Myopia exudes from the timbers of its long, quaint club-house. The ceilings are low, while the walls are panelled and are really old, for in quite early days of New England this, or part of it, was a farm-house.

The name of the club in this case has nothing to do with golf, nor with the name of a place, for the place is Hamilton. Myopia is a technical term for near-sight. The original members despised the game, and as for letting it influence them in their choice of name of the club, such a thing is inconceivable. Originally, and for long afterwards, and primarily even now, Myopia is a hunt club; it prides itself on being so, and when anybody asks one of the old hunting members if they do not possess a good golf course there, he might say he supposed they did play some game with that name there sometimes. In the early days, I believe that many of the members wore coloured glasses for some reasons connected with their sight, and it was through this that the name of the club was given. Golf was a very late addition, and some of the old hunting-men, whom you will see moving about the club-house in real and unaffected riding costume as hardly anywhere else in America, feel a little sore about it still, and it is even now the fact that the hunting section keep to themselves in one part of the club and the golfers to themselves in their part, with such as Mr. Herbert Leeds and one or two others in both. Mr. Leeds showed me some of the old prints on the walls illustrating the race meetings that had taken place there in almost prehistoric times, and some mementoes of the early days of the golf club, together with the score card of George Duncan's record round on the course. I hope you realise that Myopia is not an ordinary golf club; I did so within a minute of my arrival there.

The course is not like others in America. It is almost more of the open heathland sort of course than any other I have tramped over while in the country. It is a little barer, seemingly a little wilder than most of the others, and none the worse for that. Its putting-greens are capital, and at some of the holes, if not all, I have certainly trodden on turf that is better than anything else that my feet have touched on that side of the Atlantic. I remember that I nearly shouted with delight to my partner when I came upon the first stretch of it—green and soft and velvety. But it was not all like that, and in some respects I do think that, splendid as the course is, praise of it has been a little overdone. Yet on the other hand it is certainly a course that grows on the constant player there, and reveals new subtleties to him every time of playing. That after all is the test of a great course. Architecturally many of the holes are splendid. I do not quite like the idea of the man having to drive uphill at the first hole, but the tee-shot has most decidedly to be placed—to the left—or the player has the most fearful approach that he might ever dream of after the most indigestible dinner. The fourth hole is a splendid one of the dog-leg kind, a drive and an iron with the green very well bunkered, and some very low land to the left which is a constant attraction to the weak-minded ball. Then for my own part I liked the tenth very much, for a big drive has to be done over some high ground with a bunker away to the right that draws hard at sliced balls, while the green is one of the nicest and most prettily guarded. I lingered about it for some time in an admiring way. The last hole also has infinitely more in it than appears at the first glance, for here again a big bunker jutting into the edge of the green and to the right is a strong factor, especially when the pin is behind it; and if the hero does not place his tee-shot to the left, and within a very little space there, too, he will be sorry. It is 6335 yards round the course. In the club-house over the tea-cups, on the occasion of my first visit, I pondered upon the marvellous excellence of Duncan's record round, and paid some most sincere compliments to Mr. Leeds for the quality of the golf architecture of Myopia, for it is he, after close study of the best British models, who has been chiefly responsible for it.

A day and night at the Brae Burn Country Club at West Newton, near Boston, left a warm glow lingering in my mind. Here if anywhere in America there is country charm and social delight. Nowhere is the idea of the complete and happy social community of the country club better developed. The course is a fine one, and here also, at the time of my first visit, extensive works were being carried out, and some splendid new holes over heaving land were in the process of formation. They have since been completed and the course has now risen to the highest standard. The putting-greens are in the nicest and most beautiful places, belts of trees line the fairway at several of the holes; there are others in open country, and the short ones are uncommonly good. A new one that they were making then, calling for a drive from a height down to a pocket-handkerchief kind of green is one that I hope to be puzzled at in the play within a few weeks of the moment when I write. I had the happiness then to nominate the situation of a new bunker at one of the new holes, and sure I am that a momentary vexation will be the result when I play that hole, for I, too, in America, have found that I develop the American hook, which seems to be in the climate and the soil. It was on this course that Harry Vardon in his all-conquering tour in America in 1900 sustained his only defeat. Our dinner-party in the club-house in the evening is an unforgettable reminiscence. It was a good-fellowship golfing party such as this game only can bring about. Mr. Harry L. Ayer, Mr. E. A. Wilkie, Mr. George Gilbert, Mr. C. I. Travelli, good Anderson and self talked our golf, British and American, to the full extent of a good ability. One of the topics was club captaincy, and the discussion we had may lead to the creation of the office at Brae Burn and elsewhere, for it is a curious thing that the American clubs have never thought of creating captains, and this community was rather pleased with the idea. It is an office that a golf club needs. If the captain is the right man, if he is chosen for his past service, for his present strength, and for his tact and quality as man and golfer, he can do much for a club, and his appointment is a recognition that a club needs for its best and most faithful men.

§

The country round about New York abounds in interesting golfing places, and if inclination were followed there should be descriptions given of Nassau, of Apawamis (not forgetting the rock to the right of the first green there which an English ball most usefully struck when the thirty-seventh hole was being played in the final of the American championship, Mr. Fred Herreshoff, finalist, being loser thereby), of Garden City, Baltusrol, and many other good golfing places in these parts. Garden City is a name familiar to golfers in Britain, because it is the place where Mr. Walter J. Travis came from when he won the championship at Sandwich. If it lacks some of the boldness of feature of some of the later American courses, yet this is a fine testing course, thoroughly—and so deeply!—bunkered, and with splendid putting-greens, and all the place round about is very pleasant. And now I am very anxious to see Piping Rock, as I soon expect to do.

There are good reasons for making a journey by the Pennsylvania railroad from New York to Washington. One must pay the visitor's homage to the seat of American government and experience the feeling of being at the heart of the States, with its magnificent buildings and its historical remembrances. It is an intensely interesting place. At the White House there is Mr. President Wilson who is a golfer, as ex-President Taft was, and remains one of the keenest in the land. Mr. Taft will write enthusiastically about the game, and make speeches about it when he thinks it proper. "My advice to the middle-aged and older men who have never played golf," he says, "is to take it up. It will be a rest and recreation from business cares, out of which they will get an immense amount of pleasure, and at the same time increase their physical vigour and capacity for work as well as improve their health." And he also says, "Preceding the election campaign in which I was successful, there were many of my sympathisers and supporters who deprecated its becoming known that I was addicted to golf, as an evidence of aristocratic tendencies and a desire to play only a rich man's game. You know, and I know, that there is nothing more democratic than golf, and there is nothing which furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint, nothing which puts one more on an equality with one's fellows—or, I may say, puts one lower than one's fellows—than the game of golf. If there is any game that will instil in one's heart a more intense feeling of self-abasement and humiliation than the game of golf, I should like to know what it is." One who was in office there told me something of his enthusiasm for the game. I asked him how often Mr. Taft had played when he was there in the golfing season. The answer was that Mr. Taft used to play every day, positively every day, and some of those who played with him indicated to me what a very thorough and determined golfer he was. It might be said of the ex-President that he has spent more time in bunkers than most citizens, because he has generally insisted on playing out, no matter how many strokes have been needed. He has been playing now for sixteen years, and is quite one of the oldest American golfers in point of service to the game. Nothing can take away from him the distinction of having been the first President of the United States to play what they have determined shall be their national game.

§

I had a happy experience when one day I left New York, where it was most swelteringly hot, and went up into the Green Mountains of Vermont for golf at the Ekwanok Country Club. A friend, Mr. Henry W. Brown of Philadelphia, who had played with me at my favourite Brancaster in Norfolk once, had heard I was somewhere in America and sent a letter to me directed to a chance address, which, being a golfing kind of address, found me with little delay. "Come," said Brown, "to Manchester-in-the-Mountains in Vermont. You ought to see our quite famous Ekwanok course, and I can promise you some fine mountain air, good golf, and a hearty welcome. If you will tell me what train you will come by, I will meet you with the car at Manchester Station." A moment's hesitation dissolved in firm decision and action, which took the form of a taxi-cab to the New York Central Station, and the north-bound train which left at twenty minutes to one in the afternoon. Then along we went by the Hudson river, up which I had sailed from Albany a year before, past the Palisades, past Poughkeepsie and the Catskill Mountains, through Troy and Albany, and as the daylight waned we were mounting upwards through the hills of sweet Vermont. At a quarter to eight the train reached Manchester, Brown and his car were waiting there, and we sped along the main street to his home.

It seemed that the silver moonlight was shining not upon an earthen road but glistening on snow. Little villas like chalets and chateaux of Switzerland lined the way and the people living in them could be heard in their laughter and song, for the dinner time was just gone by and yellow light shone from the windows, making that happy contrast with the coldness of the moonshine, that speaks of home and comfort. We passed the great hotel where five hundred people are constantly gathered together in the summer time from all parts of the States, and indeed from places far beyond the States, for there are Britons in numbers here, and travellers from Africa and the deep southern lands, making such a cosmopolitan gathering of its size for drawing-rooms and bridge parties and the usual orderings of social gatherings as is not easily to be matched. And there is an amazing vivacity among all these people, for two reasons, one being that the American spirit at its best pervades, and the other that it is Ekwanok, the heartening, the vigour-making, the youth-restoring. In New York and Chicago at the end of the day one is a little apt to think of the wear and tear of life and the fading capacity of a good constitution; high up in the mountains of Vermont, in the shadow of the hills of Equinox, one revels in fresh youth again and has no more envy for the lad of twenty. And that again is a reason why Ekwanok is not like the other golfing places of America, and another following upon it is that this is, so far as I have discovered, the only truly golfing holiday resort in all the States, a place to which people go for the pleasure of the happy game and for hardly anything else, a place that lives and thrives on golf. From far and wide the Americans come to it and leave all their work behind, and are happy and leisurely as you rarely see them at other times. In Britain we have a very large number of resorts that are for holiday golf alone, and more are coming all the time, but this is a feature of golf that America in general has yet to know. If it comes to that, Manchester-in-the-Mountains is not so very high (that is a rather curious association of English ideas—Manchester and mountains, dingy streets with the smoke-thickened atmosphere of the Lancashire city and the big bold hills of God), but here is the mountain scent, enlivening, heartening. The house of my host, Breezy Bank as it is called, is set at the foot of one big mountain and looks across the green valley, where the golf course lies, out toward another—a delightful abode. A log fire burned red on the big hearth, a kind hostess gave us welcome, and after a supper that embraced fresh green corn (it is the essence of the enjoyment of green corn that it should be taken quickly from the growing to the kitchen), we talked, over cigars and coffee, golf from one end of the game to the other, and right across it, and handled clubs, until bedtime came. Brown is keen, and he has sound views on the influence of the game on national character.

Next morning, with sunlight and breeze, we went along to the course, so near that a ball could have been driven to it from the lawn of Breezy Bank, where the master has been known to practise mashie shots by moonlight, and I was joined in foursome with Mr. Walter Fairbanks of Denver, Colorado, against B. and his son Theodore. What then happened is of no consequence; the tale may be told in Colorado but not in England. But the course—it is splendid, and reflects an infinity of credit upon Mr. James L. Taylor, the first in command, who has for the most part designed it, has constantly improved it, and has made it what it is. All the holes have abundant character. They are up and down, straight and crooked, interesting always, with a good fairway that gives fine lies to the ball, and putting-greens of the smoothest sort. We drove first down a hill with a slanting hazard that made awful menace to a slice, then up again and away out to the far parts, with some very pretty short holes. The gem of the collection of eighteen is the seventh, which has been called, and with some fitness, the King of American Holes. A great, fine, lusty piece of golf it is, 537 yards from the tee to the green, and every shot has to be a thoughtful, strong, and well-directed shot, with no girl's golf in it anywhere. It is a down drive from the high-placed tee, and the land below heaves over in a curious twisted way that demands very exact placing of the ball. Then there is a strong and straight second to be played over a high ridge in front into which big bunkers have been cut. Afterwards there is plain country to a well-protected green. It is a great hole, a romantic one, and is well remembered. Some of the drive-and-iron holes that follow are splendid things, and this course was very well chosen for the Amateur Championship Meeting in 1914. When we were leaving it at the end of that day, the sun had just gone down behind big Equinox Hill, but presently and by surprise he sent a last good-bye. Round the mountain side a golden bar of light was cast, and it spread along the olive-coloured hill across the shadowed valley like a clean-cut shining stripe or a monotinted rainbow. These were the glorious Green Mountains of Vermont! We tarried until the sun went right away, and took with it that parting beam, and, sighing, we passed along.

§

I have left to the last of these few remembrances, what is in many respects the greatest of American courses—the National Golf Links at the far end of Long Island. In recent times it has probably been more discussed than any other course on earth. A while since a number of very wealthy, ambitious, and determined golfers put their heads and their money together, and decided on the establishment of something as near perfection as they could reach. In pursuit of this idea they have so far, as I am informed, spent about two hundred thousand dollars, and are in the act of spending many more thousands. They have their reward in a magnificent creation, as great in result as in idea, or nearly. All the people in the golf world have heard by this time of this National Links, and have no doubt wondered upon it, and the extent to which the extraordinary scheme that was developed a few years ago has been realised. It has been referred to as "the amazing experiment," and "the millionaires' dream," and so forth. Undoubtedly in its conception it was the grandest golfing scheme ever attempted. It came about in this way. America, with all its golf and money and enthusiasm, was without any course which might be compared with our first-class seaside links, the chief reason for her deficiency being that nowhere on either of her seaboards could be discovered a piece of land which was of the real British golfing kind. But at last a tract was found nearly at the end of Long Island, about ninety miles from New York, which was believed to be nearly the right thing. It was taken possession of by a golfing syndicate, and they determined there to do their very best. The question of expense was not to be considered in the matter. A member of the syndicate, Mr. Charles B. Macdonald, an old St. Andrews man, and one of wide golfing knowledge and experience, went abroad to study, photograph, and make plans of the best holes in Great Britain and on the continent. The whole world of golf was laid under tribute to assist in the creation of this wonder course. After exhaustive consideration a course was decided upon which was to embrace, in a certain reasonable measure, features of such eminent holes as the third, eleventh, and seventeenth at St. Andrews, the Cardinal and the Alps at Prestwick, the fifth and ninth at Brancaster, the Sahara at Sandwich, the Redan at North Berwick, and some others. The scheme was modified somewhat as the work progressed, but in due course the National Golf Links, a string of pearls as it was intended to be, was opened. Many different reports have been circulated as to the quality of the course, and the extent to which the object has been achieved. It has been described both as a failure and as a magnificent success.

I preferred to go there alone and see things for myself without explanations and influences. A certain penalty had, however, to be paid for this enterprise. I shall not soon forget my journey to the Shinnecock Hills out at the end of the Island, nor the journey back again. It was on a glorious Sunday morning in October that I went to the Pennsylvania station and took train there for Shinnecock, which was a three-hours' journey along the line. In getting out at Shinnecock I was nearest to the course, but there were no cars waiting there, and the tramp that had to be made across country for two or three miles was one that might have suited an Indian brave better than it suited me, although I have an instinct and a desire always to find things and ways out for myself rather than be told and led. It was nearly noon; the sun was high, and it was burning fiercely. The so-called path was something of a delusion. It was more of a trail through a virgin bush country with a tendency to swamp here and there, and occasionallv one was led to a cul-de-sac. I could see the National Golf Links a little way ahead all the time. There was a big water cistern standing out against the sky-line, and there were some smoothly laid out holes, but grapes were never more tantalising to any fox than those holes are to the wanderer who tries to get there from Shinnecock along a route over which a crow might fly, and who determines that he will discover the elusive secrets of the National Links, however dearly the expedition may cost him. However, the enterprise succeeded, and the journey back from the course to the Southampton station was also accomplished despite the prevailing difficulties, and, with the sense of something having been attempted and done, we rode home on the Pennsylvania, and were back in New York by the same night—about the hardest day's golf business I have ever done.

A certain disappointment is inevitably threatened when one visits a course of this kind about which one has heard so much beforehand. An ideal is established in the mind which cannot possibly be realised, and it is the fault of nobody. We do not know exactly what it is that we hope to see, but it is something beyond the power of man and Nature to achieve. But the National is a great course, a very great course. It is charmingly situated, most excellently appointed, and bears evidence of the most thorough and intelligent treatment by its constructors. Any preliminary disappointment there may have been soon wears away as the real excellence of the course and its difficulties are appreciated. Had we heard nothing of this copying, and did we not make comparisons between new and old in the mind, through which that which is new does not often survive, we should glory in the National at the first inspection of it. And the fact is, that the comparisons we suggest ought never to be made, though I, for one, was not aware of that till afterwards. Absolute copying was never intended; only the governing features of the British holes, the points that gave the character and quality to them, were imitated so far as could be done. That has been done very well, and some of the holes are very fine things. Those the design of which is based on such gems as the sixth at Brancaster and the eleventh at St. Andrews are very well recognisable. I should like to write much more about this course; it is a strong temptation. If I thought less of it and did not realise its greatness as I do, I should yield to the desire, and yielding, might rashly criticise as well as praise. But there is an imperative restraint. Upon a moderate course, or even a very good one, you may sometimes, if sufficiently self-confident, judge in one day's experience. But there are courses which, not because they grow upon you as we say, but because they command a higher respect at once than is given to others, which do not permit of such presumption. I saw the National on one day only, though I hope to see it many times again, and to gain courage for comment upon it. Now, with cap in hand, I can only signify my respect and full appreciation that here is something that is by no means of an ordinary kind, the accomplishment of a magnificent enterprise, and no doubt the achievement of a great ideal. But I shall say, at any rate, that a links more gloriously situated than this one in Peconic Bay, with pretty creeks running into the land here and there, and hill views at the back, could hardly be imagined. The view as I beheld it from different parts on that peaceful sunny Sunday afternoon is one that I never shall forget. It is the ideal situation for a national course.

§

To Mr. Macdonald thus belongs the credit for the initiation of what we may call the higher golf in America. In the last few years this movement has made strides as long and rapid in the United States as it has done in England, and above all other countries in the world America, which is so much dependent on her inland golf, having scarcely any other, is the country for this movement to be carried to its ultimate legitimate point. The day for very plain and purely and obviously artificial construction of inland golf courses is gone, the original inland system in all its stupidity and its surrender to difficulties has become archaic. It has come to be realised in this business that man may associate himself with Nature in a magnificent enterprise, and only now is it understood that this golf course construction is, or may be, a really splendid art. Landscape gardening is a fine thing in the way of modelling in earth and with the assistance of trees and plants and flowers and the natural forces, while engineering across rivers and mountains is grander perhaps; but in each of these the man takes his piece of the world from Nature and shovels it and smashes it, and then, according to his own fancy and to suit his own needs, he arranges it all over again. But in the making of a golf course, while we have indeed to see that certain requirements of our own are well suited, knowing how particular and hyper-critical we have become, yet we wish to keep to plain bold Nature too, and we want our best work to be thoroughly in harmony with her originals. I believe that if we could express it properly to ourselves, we wish now to make our golf courses look as if they were fashioned at the tail-end of things on the evening of the sixth day of the creation of the world—just when thoughts had to be turning to the rest and happinesses of the seventh. And so the great architect now takes a hundred acres or more of plain rough land and forest, hills and dales among it, and with magnificent imagination shapes it to his fancy. The work he now does will endure in part, if not in whole, for ages hence, and so it is deeply responsible. It is a splendid art; I do not hesitate to say it is a noble art.

Mr. Colt, with his great thoughts and his splendid skill, has done fine work in several parts of the United States. The new courses of the Mayfield Country Club, and of the Country Club of Detroit, are splendid things. But Mr. Macdonald's creations—for more of them now follow upon the original at Southampton—are destined to be leading influences in the new American golf course construction. I have had some interesting talk with him upon these matters, and am glad to find that he is artist and creator enough to have the full strength of his own original opinions in this matter, especially as in some ways his ideals differ from those commonly accepted in Britain. I have been so much interested in his views, and I think that these views are destined to have such an enormous influence upon American golf in the future, that I have asked him for some brief statement of them, an enunciation of his creed as an architect of courses, and he has kindly made it to me in writing, as follows:—

"To begin with, I think the tendency to-day is to overdo matters somewhat, making courses too long, too difficult, and with too much sameness in the construction of two-shot holes. To my mind a course over 6400 yards becomes tiresome. I would not have more than eight two-shot holes, and in constructing them I should not follow the ideas or fancies of any one golf architect, but should endeavour to take the best from each. While it is the fashion now to decry the construction of a hole involving the principles of the Alps or seventeenth at Prestwick, I favour two blind holes of that character—one constructed similar to the Alps, and another of the punch-bowl variety of hole some fifty yards longer than the Alps. It is interesting now to read the 'best hole' discussion that took place in 1901. The leading golfers of that time were almost unanimous in pronouncing the Alps at Prestwick the best two-shot hole in the world. The eleventh at St. Andrews and the Redan at North Berwick were almost unanimously picked as the best one-shot holes.

"To my mind there should be four one-shot holes, namely, 130, 160, 190, and 220 yards. These holes should be so constructed that a player can see from the tee where the flag enters the hole. The shorter the hole the smaller should be the green, and the more closely should it be bunkered. The most difficult hole in golf to construct interestingly is a three-shot hole, of which I would place two in the eighteen, one 520 yards and the other 540. The putting greens at these holes should be spacious.

"This leaves us four drive-and-pitch holes—280, 300, 320, and 340 yards in length. These should have relatively small greens and be closely bunkered, one or two of them having the putting greens open on one side or corner so as to give a powerful, long, courageous driver, who successfully accomplishes the long carry, the advantage of a short run up to the green. The size and contour of the putting green and the bunkering should depend upon the character and length of the hole. The principle of the dog's hind leg can be made a feature of several holes advantageously. The gradients between the tee and the hole should be made use of in bunkering. Whenever it is possible it is best that the bunkers should be in view. A number of the holes should be built with diagonal bunkers, or bunkers en echelon, so constructed that the player who takes the longer carry shall have an advantage over the man who takes the shorter carry. The hazards for the second shot should be so placed and designed as to give a well-placed tee shot every advantage—in other words, should make a man play his first stroke in relation to the second shot. There should be at least three tees for every hole, to take care not only of an adverse or favourable wind, but also of the calibre of the player. It is necessary on a first-class golf course to have short tees for the poorer players, otherwise they are everlastingly in the bunkers. The lengths which I give should be measured from the middle of the middle tee to the middle of the putting green."

There is so much knowledge and good suggestion in this statement, and the matter is of such high consequence, that every player of the game should think well upon it.

CHAPTER VIII

THE U. S. G. A., AND THE METHODS OF THE BUSINESS-MAN GOLFER, WITH A REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENT OF MUNICIPAL GOLF.

People in England or Scotland do not quite understand what a splendid thing for American golf is the United States Golf Association. It is so absolutely necessary for the game in America that I am sure there would be little that is like golf there now if there had been no U. S. G. A., with its loyalty and attachment to St. Andrews. There would be few Americans coming to play on the links of the homeland of the game, and there would be no British golfers wandering happily among the American courses. American golf would have become as much like the old game as American college football is like the football that is played at Oxford and Cambridge, which is to say that it is not at all like it. America is not a country small in space like our own happy islands. There it is in its millions of miles, new everywhere, and with little communities of golfers so far apart as New York and San Francisco, Massachusetts and Arizona, and isolated golfers in the loneliest places trying to bring others to their pastime for the matches they would have. What should all these people, away from all the influences of the home of the game, hot with the spirit of freedom, unrestrained by laws and conventionalities, eager to do things better than they have been done before—what should they care for St. Andrews and traditions, and the preservation of the unity of the game? As sure as eagles fly, and stars are bright, they would have made it to suit themselves in every community. Here they would have abolished the stymie, in another place they would have changed the size of the hole, away in Texas they might have permitted the introduction of the "mechanical contrivance," and soon there would have been a hundred golfs in the States, and not a real one among them. Just when this possibility, without being an immediate probability, was arising the U. S. G. A. came into existence. It joined all the golfers of America together in a republic for the preservation of the unity of the game, and for the promotion of its welfare in the spirit that the game had been cultivated in the homeland. And being thus given power, it has ruled with a strong hand. It has kept American golf in order as nothing else could have done, and as a governmental machine, I who have made some close examination of it, regard it as perfect, which is not to say that we need such a thing in Britain. In America I have had the pleasure of the intimate acquaintance of Mr. Robert Watson, Mr. Silas H. Strawn, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, Mr. William Fellowes Morgan, Mr. Harry L. Ayer, Mr. John Reid, junior, and many others of the leaders of the Union, and better men for the direction of such a game as golf, in whose hands it is quite safe, there could not be. They hold the right spirit of the game, and they are wise men, conservative in their golfing ways. Mr. Windeler indeed is an old British golfer like Mr. Macdonald, who was one of the original gathering that established the U. S. G. A. In the December of 1894 the representatives of five of the leading clubs met and framed the constitution of the U. S. G. A., and Mr. Theodore A. Havemeyer, of the Newport Club, was chosen president.

The constitution of the U.S.G.A. is an interesting study. There are two classes of members, active and allied, and the difference is that the active members, who exercise control, are clubs that have been steadied by age and experience, and have acquired dignity. The definition in the constitution is made thus: "Any regularly organised club in the United States, supporting and maintaining a golf course of at least nine holes, and whose reputation and general policy are in accord with the best traditions and the high ideals of the game, shall be eligible to election as an Active Member." Then, as to the Allied Members, it is said that—"Any regularly organised club of good reputation in the United States shall be eligible to election as an Allied Member." There are far more allied members than there are active members, and the former are only admitted to the latter when they have thoroughly proved their worth. Thus the allied clubs have always an ambition before them, and they can only achieve it by conducting their golf on the best and oldest plan. At every meeting of the Association each active club is entitled to be represented by one voting delegate whose appointment has to be certified in advance by his club to the secretary of the Association. Allied clubs have no voting privileges, but all members of active and allied clubs have the right to attend all meetings of the Association, and to participate in the discussion of any question. The active clubs pay thirty dollars a year for subscription, and the allied clubs pay ten. Article IX. of the Constitution gives the Association its power and authority. It says: "The acceptance of membership in the Association shall bind each club to uphold all the provisions of the Constitution, bye-laws, and other rules of the Association; and to accept and enforce all rules and decisions of the Executive Committee acting within its jurisdiction. Any club failing in its obligations as above set forth may be suspended or expelled by a two-thirds vote of the Association, or by a two-thirds vote of all members of the Executive Committee; provided such club shall have been given due notice of the charge or charges preferred against it, and an opportunity to be heard in its own defence. Any club thus suspended or expelled by vote of the Executive Committee may appeal from its decision to the delegates at any annual or special meeting of the Association."

§

After this about the machinery of American golf, consider the men. There are three classes of golfers in the United States, corresponding to some extent to similar classes in Britain, but they are rather more sharply defined than with us. There is the class that regards the game as a sport for competition, almost as a form of athletics, being mainly but not exclusively the younger class; there is the business-man class that believes in it as the ideal, and indeed the only recreation satisfying the needs of the times as a relaxation from the strain of life and work, and a means of promoting physical and mental efficiency, such people being as with us the largest section and the mainstay in one sense of the game; and there is the humbler class who play upon the public courses.

I do not believe after the closest observation and most impartial consideration that the best American golfers are yet quite so good as ours, but in recent years they have been rapidly lessening the gap that has existed, their thoroughness, determination, and efficiency are most wonderful, and if they had our courses and climate they might become better than we are. They think they will anyhow. As it is they are handicapped by lack of full-blooded seaside courses, and a climate that is by no means ideal for the game; and although by their zeal they have to some extent discounted that handicap, I feel that they can only neutralise it altogether and go beyond it by the production of the occasional genius. The good Americans seem to me mostly to play what we could call a plain, straight game. American courses are for the most part without any sharp undulations; there is nothing in America like our rolling seaside links. Therefore the players are not taught or induced to be making allowances for this and that in all the days of their golf from their youth upwards, and they have not the sea-coast winds to lead them in the same way as we have. So they have good reason to play straight to the hole, and never to depart from doing so without the most obvious and pressing cause. It follows from this that the American players have fewer "scientific" or "fancy" strokes at their disposal, and those who have visited this country have been remarked upon for the plain simplicity of their iron play. They seem to standardise their shots. But assuming that this is their principle or their system, it enables them to concentrate keenly and with fine effect on accuracy. Delicacy of touch, splendid judgment of distance, and perfection of execution are strong characteristics of the American players, who do not need to be reminded that there are no bunkers in the air. It is the straight game of the Americans with all its accuracy that is paying in their matches against us. At the same time I think that the comparative weakness of the Americans in wooden club play is a serious handicap to them, and their courses need to be tightened up to improve it. That "American hook" of theirs is a dangerous thing sometimes, and their round flat swings are looked upon by some of our best British authorities with much suspicion.

But there is one most important way in which they are scoring over us. They are beating us in temperament, concentration, and determination, and in the capacity to make the very most of their own game, so that not a shot of it is wasted. This means very much. A man may be plus five, but of such a temperament and such ways that he habitually wastes two or three holes in a match through negligence or slackness. The Americans do not waste holes in this way. They waste nothing. The game of which they are capable is produced nearly every time at full quality and is made as effective as it possibly can be. The utmost pains are taken over every stroke; the man blames himself for nothing after it is made. His concentration is enormous; he is often inclined to race through the green, but his capacity for being slow and meditative, when necessary, is great; and most noticeable again is his persistence, which is another way of making the most of a game that a man possesses. Of course all these remarks are applied to the two classes of players in a very general way. There are many exceptions among the Americans and there are many among our players, but that they do indicate the tendencies in the two countries I am certain. The American game may not be as scientific and complete as ours, but its more serious exponents do make the most of it as ours do not, and probably the high importance that is attached to the numerous first-class tournaments they have over there has something to do with it. They believe in competitions more than we do.

§

This matter of consideration and concentration is one to which every player should give closer attention. His success is largely dependent upon it. He may think he concentrates enormously as it is, more than on anything else, but often he deceives himself. Not one man in ten gets as much in effect out of his game as it is capable of. He walks to his ball and plays some kind of a shot, with a more or less hazy idea of what it is that he wishes to do. When he finds his object has not been accomplished he suddenly remembers something, and it is a case of "I should have known," or "If I had only thought," or "What a pity I did not look." With such people a round of golf is a succession of regrets, and it is the simple truth that the majority could do far better with their game if they did not waste so much of it by carelessness, thoughtlessness, and a sort of distraction which allows their minds to wander to other things than the stroke in hand, and sometimes by their conversation too. When a man has played a stroke he has quite sufficient to occupy his mind for the next minute or two in considering how he shall play the next one, and the many features of the case that will be presented to him.

It is a remunerative resolution to make at the beginning of the season, to think deeply upon all the points of match play, and then exploit the art of it with some thoroughness. It is not difficult. All who have attended the Amateur Championship meetings and have been close observers of what happens there can remember how even players of the very first class in this most important of tournaments let themselves get beaten by inferior players simply because they do not make the most of their game. They forget things, do not think enough, and play strokes carelessly because at the time of doing so they seem to feel it does not matter. No stroke should ever be played as though it were not the most important of the game—as it might turn out to be. The old maxim that if a thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing well, applies with tremendous force to match-play golf. Many a time when the result of a stroke played exactly as intended, is not what was anticipated, through some of the circumstances not having been taken into consideration, the mistake that was made is obvious then. The man excuses himself by saying that he cannot see and think of everything, but nine times out of ten he should have seen. The most fatal mistake, however, that many players make in the early part of the season when their match-playing qualities have not been properly revived, is in their letting matches slip, in not pressing home advantages that they gain, and, above all, being too indifferent upon the future in the early part of a match, and too careless when they get a lead. All this sounds very simple, very obvious, but it often takes the best part of a season to drive the lessons home into the minds of golfers who are losing matches through their weakness in fighting quality.

Now here are one or two samples of points in regard to which the golfer constantly neglects to display his cunning and is the loser thereby. Assuming that in the general way you can get as much length when it is wanted as the other man, always try to make him play the odd to you. You do so naturally with your tee shots and many of the others, but are not really thinking at the time that you are wanting him to play the odd. The man who is playing the odd, even from a very little way behind the other, is at a much greater moral disadvantage than is often suspected, and if the other man always noticed things as much as he should, he is at a greater practical advantage than he realises, for if his opponent fails he can see the cause of it, this remark applying especially to what happens in the short game. How many putts have gone wrong that never need have done had the man who made them watched what happened when his adversary putted first! Then, again, on this point of making the other man play the odd the case is constantly recurring where both men are obliged to play short of some hazard, or to take a particular line to a hole which is not the straight one. The man who goes second will find it very much to his advantage if he tries to squeeze so closely up to the point of danger as to be just nearer to it than the other, the latter then having to play the odd and being then more inclined to press with it and perhaps to miss it. The man who is playing the odd is in a sense taking a shot into the unknown; the other man knows everything. That is just the difference. Another stupid mistake that many men make is to try experimental or fancy shots, perhaps with clubs that are unfamiliar to them, just because the other man has played two more. How many thousands of holes have been lost through that! The experimental shot fails, the other man makes a good one, the experimenter suddenly finds he has to fight for it, and a minute or two later is watching his adversary take the honour from the next tee. Again, what matches could have been won that were lost if the players had only shown half the sense that Mr. Hilton did in the Amateur Championship of 1912 at Prestwick, in picking his places for putting, as it were, always, whenever possible, running up so that he would have to putt uphill instead of down, the former being far the easier kind of putting. Nowadays there are inclines on every green and round about the hole, and a flat putt is a comparative rarity. But the average man never thinks of these inclines until he has to play along them. The time for most thinking about them is when making the stroke before, so that the putt may be along the easiest line to the hole. This is not a question of skill; it is simply one of sense. A man can play short of the hole or past it, or to the right or left, and there will be one point from which the putting will be easier than the other. It may often happen that it would pay better to be four yards past the hole than two short of it, for you will not only have had the chance of holing, but the putt back may be an uphill one.

But with it all, the habit must be cultivated of thinking as much as possible in advance—thinking quickly and acting with decision. Questions of the value of practice swings have arisen lately. We have seen rather too much of these practice swings in some quarters. We may believe in the practice swing—just one or at most two. A man may be an experienced golfer, and he may have played a certain stroke nearly a million times before, but golf is essentially a game of fears and doubts, and apart from just setting the right muscles in a state of complete preparation for the task in hand a practice swing gives one a little confidence. The shot is shaped; there is nothing to do but repeat the stroke that has been made; it can be done. To that extent the practice swing may be thoroughly recommended. But some members of the young American School go farther than this, and it is questionable whether they are wise. For one thing the delicate muscles and the nervous system that are concerned with the stroke in hand are easily tired, and if the shot is a long one needing power the odds are against its being done so well after five practice swings as after one. Show me the man who can drive his best and straightest after five practice swings on the tee. Then there is the hesitation and doubt that are induced. I believe that in most cases these players are really waiting for an inspiration. They are not ready for the stroke they have to play. Jack White in once confiding to me some of the secrets of his successful putting, said that when he went about on the green examining the line back and front, he was simply trying to gain time and nothing more. "I want to feel that I want to putt," he said, "and while I am waiting for that feeling coming on I can hardly stand motionless on the green or look up at the sky." It is that way with these Americans; they are waiting for an inspiration. But it does not always seem to be responsive, and they wait too long. A moment must come when they are as ready for the shot as ever they will be in their lives; if they let it pass nothing but doubts and hesitations can follow, and that is the danger to the player of excessive slowness. He begins to fear his fate too much. And also one round of golf played like this makes a fearful mental strain, and how often do we see that men who win their morning matches by such methods look very tired and lose easily in the afternoon.

The case of Mr. Ouimet, who has so suddenly become a great power in American golf, has already been considered, and Mr. Walter Travis's high position was established long ago. Apart from these two, the new star and the old one, and the young professional M'Dermott, there are two others who hold a higher place in the opinion of the golfers of their own country and ours than any other players do, and those are Mr. Charles Evans, junior, of Chicago, and Mr. Jerome D. Travers, foremost players of the west and east as they respectively are. In every way Mr. Evans is a very delightful golfer. When we saw him at Prestwick in 1911 he was even then a brilliant player, and one who impressed British golfers as no other had ever done since Mr. Travis had won at Sandwich, and he had then an advantage which the winner of our championship had not—he had his whole golfing life before him. Since that time he has undoubtedly improved. He has become physically stronger, experience has helped him, and he has greater resource and skill. And despite the fact that he has not yet won an American championship, there is this to be said for him, that in the sense of accomplishment, in variety of stroke, perfection of it, in playing the game as it was meant to be played, as we say, he is still, for all his failures, the best amateur golfer in the United States at the present time. But Mr. Evans is a man of very keen and somewhat too sensitive temperament. He is inclined sometimes to fear his fate unduly. Yet whenever we are inclined to judge him a little harshly for his temperament, let it be remembered that fortune has dealt him some cruel hurts, and that it is not a quality of human man to bear himself indifferently to perpetual adversity. When he was the last hope of his country at the championship at Sandwich in 1914, and striving gallantly, his opponent went to the turn in a record score of 31. To be merely sorry for "Chick" in such circumstances is inadequate; along with him we smiled at the absurd extent to which his ill-luck spitefully pursued him then. Even though it had to be counted, it was unreal. He must be a champion some time.

One of the greatest tragedies of his life, so far, was that he suffered in the appalling Amateur Championship at Wheaton, Illinois, in 1912—appalling by reason of the terrible heat that players and all others, including my unlucky but still deeply interested self, were called upon to bear. It has come to be nearly a settled understanding in Britain that the championships must be attended by weather quite ridiculously and most uncomfortably unseasonable. Thunderstorms and lightning, gales and floods—these are the accompaniments of the great golf tournaments of the year in the summer months of May and June, and matters seemed to reach a climax in 1913 when the progress of the final match of the Amateur Championship at St. Andrews had to be suspended because of the terrific storm which flooded the putting greens until there were no holes to putt at, and when in the Open Championship at Hoylake shortly afterwards Taylor had to play his way to victory through a gale against which ordinary people could hardly stand up. Almost does it appear that the American climate is disposed to follow the bad British example in times of championships, seeing what happened at Brookline in the same season; but it was very different at Wheaton in the year when Mr. Hilton failed to retain the American Amateur Championship he had won the season before at Apawamis, and when Mr. Travers beat Mr. Evans in the final by seven and six. Mr. Norman Hunter and some others, Americans, were burned out of that championship by a temperature which at times was more than a hundred in the shade, and while some players conducted their game beneath sunshades that they carried, most of them had towels attached to their golf bags for body-wiping purposes. There was no escape from the heat anywhere, night or day, and no consolation in anything, unless it were that in the city of Chicago a few miles distant the people were reported to be even worse off than we were, and deaths were numerous. Well did we call that the blazing championship, and when I am asked, as is often the case, which of all championship experiences I recall most vividly, my remembrances of events in Britain, far more numerous as they are, give way to an American pair, the hot one at Wheaton in 1912, and the wet one of the British debâcle at Brookline a season later. But the sun at its worst could not diminish the enormous interest that there was in that Wheaton final, for the draw and the play had brought about the ideal match, from the spectators' point of view, and even that of the players too, Mr. Travers of the east and Mr. Evans of the west, and finely did the Americans show their appreciation of what had come to pass by wagering incredible numbers of dollars upon it and watching it in thousands. That time it was thought that Mr. Evans would win, and he was three up at the turn in the morning round, but he lost two of the holes before lunch, and I am sure that the reason why he fell such an easy victim to Mr. Travers in the afternoon was that he grieved too much for the loss of those holes, and feared his fate when he need not have done. I know that Mr. Travers in that second round played golf of the most brilliant description that nobody could have lived against; but did Mr. Evans encourage him to do so? This matter of temperament might seem to be a fatal consideration for ever, being one of Nature and seemingly unalterable, were it not that we have had cases of fine golfers with weak temperaments who, perceiving their desperate state, have resolutely and with patience changed those temperaments, or curbed their influence as we should more properly say. The best modern instance of such a change being made is that of George Duncan, and never fear but that "Chick" will soon come to his own as well.

Mr. Jerome Travers is undoubtedly one of the strong men of golf to-day, a big piece of golfing individualism. At twenty years of age he won the American Amateur Championship, in 1912 I saw him win it for the third time, and the following year he won it again at Garden City. In his own golfing country he must be one of the hardest men in the world to beat. He plays the game that suits him and disregards criticism. He began to play when he was nine years old. A year later he laid out a three-holes golf course of his own at home—first hole 150 yards, second 180, third apparently about the same, back to the starting-point. There were no real holes—to hit certain trees was to "hole out." For hour after hour this American child would make the circuit of this little course, and day after day he would work hard to lower his record for these three holes. At thirteen he started playing on a proper nine-holes course at Oyster Bay. At fifteen he became attached to the Nassau Country Club, and there, chiefly under the guidance of Alexander Smith, to whose qualities as tutor he pays high tribute, his game improved. His swing was wrong at the beginning. "Shorten your back swing, and take the club back with your wrists. Swing easily and keep your eye on the ball." That was Smith's advice to him, and he says it served him well. He began to place the right hand under instead of over the shaft, and that added more power to his stroke, and then he discovered that taking the club back with his wrists or starting the club-head back with them, increased its speed and gave him greater distance. Then it was practice, practice, practice for an hour at a time at every individual stroke in the game. He would play the same shot fifty times. He putted for two hours at a stretch, placing his ball at varying distances from the hole, trying short putts, long ones, uphill and downhill putts, and putts across a side-hill green where the ball had to follow a crescent-like course if it had to be holed out or laid dead. During the championship at Apawamis, when he was playing Mr. Hilton, he had what everybody declared to be an impossible putt of twenty feet, downhill over a billowy green, and he holed it because he had practised the same sort of putt before. In the next championship at Wheaton he did an "impossible" bunker shot and laid the ball dead from the foot of the face of the hazard because he had practised that shot also. Next to the Schenectady putter belonging to Mr. Travis his driving iron is, or should be, the most famous club in all America. It is a plain, straight-faced iron with a round back, and is heavy, weighing sixteen ounces. It has a long shaft and a very rough leather grip, and was forged at St. Andrews. This and his other irons are kept permanently rusty. He carries very few clubs—five irons, a Schenectady putter, a brassey and a driver, but, as Mr. Fred Herreshoff, who turns caddie for him in the finals of championships, says, the two latter are for the sake of appearances only. He believes in the centre-shafted Schenectady putter, illegal here but allowed in America, as in no other. He calls for a very low tee, one that is only just high enough to give him a perfect lie, "the duplicate of an ideal lie on the turf." He plays his drives off the right foot, which is about three inches in advance of the left, the ball being just a shade to the right of the left heel, because in that position he finds it easier to keep the eye on the ball without effort, and in the strain of a hard match or competition every simplifying process like this is valuable.