THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS

THE
SPIRIT OF THE LINKS

BY
HENRY LEACH

GREAT GOLF, WHAT POWERFUL CHARM IS IN THY NAME!
WHAT CUNNING WITCHCRAFT IS THY FASCINATING GAME!

Blackheath Golfing Lays, 1867

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1907

[CONTENTS]

THE SPIRIT OF
THE LINKS

[SPRING]

I

To discover the secret of its wonderful charm is not the least of the problems of golf. It is a game that encourages the reflective and philosophical mind to close investigation, and so it is not enough for the worthy player that he should take the things that he sees and feels for granted, with no questions concerning the mystic influences that seem constantly to brood over the links, and the people who are of them. Each day as we go forward to the game, and in particular if it marks the beginning of a special period of play, we feel these influences strong, and it may happen that for a moment we wonder again as to their cause and their origin.

Many minds have made great efforts towards the discovery of this secret, but the fruits thereof have not been satisfying. Golf is not like other games which stir up great enthusiasms in their players. Long spells of failure or of ambition thwarted often kill the passion that has fed the energy of the players of these games; but that is not the case with golf, and golf almost alone. Nor does a surfeit of play lessen the desire for it as it does in the case of other field sports, which need close seasons for their healthiness. When one day’s golf is over, the thought is of the next that will succeed it, and the hope already goes forward to anticipation of the superior delights that may be in store. And it makes the same appeal to all persons of all classes who once attach themselves to it, and it has been found that the golf impulses are as strong in the men of other races and of other colours as they are in the British who have cultivated the game. This universality, the constant enthusiasm, the unweariedness of the golfer, and the intense ardour that distinguishes him from the players of other games, suggest to us that some strong emotion of the human mind is touched by golf in some peculiar way, that its principles and the conditions of its play make a special appeal to some elementary feature of simple human nature; for it is the appeal to these primitive instincts that is always the strongest, the most overpowering.

Upon this line of investigation we come upon a clue that leads us to a more satisfactory idea as to the secret than any other which has been suggested. The strongly humanising tendencies of the game are evident to all, and admitted. No cloak of convention can be worn over the manners and thoughts of the player; he is the simple man. And what are the subtle features of the primitive instincts that are awakened in him so constantly, at almost every stroke, in every round, and on every day? It is sometimes difficult to seize upon them, floating in a vagueness as they do, but it does seem that all the strong emotions of the golfer combining to make up his grand devotion to the game, are clustered round the simple human instinct, most human and most potent of all, the instinct of Hope. It is this hope that leads the golfer on through all his troubles and disappointments, and it still urges him forward when he has already ascended to a great delight. It is a hope that will never permit complete satisfaction. This simple formula that the mystic charm of golf is hope, will explain all the emotions that rise up in the golfer in the course of a year of play. Take him from the first tee to the end of his game. It is the fresh morning, and the ardour of the golfer is warm within him, and he has a yearning and a high hope for a great day’s sport. Here, on the teeing ground, he is animated by a great desire to play the first hole as well as ever before, and to drive a clean far ball that shall speak well of his skill and make good augury for the strokes that are to come. If he succeeds his hope but increases. Does he play the tee shot badly, and his hopes go forward to a great recovery with the second shot of the game. If that should fail, vexatiously, there may still be the chance of a wonderful approach, and though the approach be not so wonderful, is there not the possibility that the gods may be so kind as to steer a very long putt into the hole? These are exactly the alternating sentiments; and if the fulfilment of the hope be denied to the last putt, and the hole be lost, at the second tee there is hope again that the indifferent start will be succeeded by a flash of brilliance as shall restore the position and the complete equanimity of the player.

And so it is from shot to shot and from hole to hole all the way round the course, and “Spero meliora” is the eternal motto, even though the present state be happy. If the whole round be weak and the result of it adverse, there is the hope of the afternoon; and at the end of the day the unfortunate golfer, moved almost to despair by his failures, soon recovers again that optimism which is his constant succour, and then his hopes are of the morrow. Does he not know now what it was that he was “doing wrong,” the golfing sin that he committed all the day? To-morrow the fault shall be corrected, and the swings that are made in after-hours now give fair promise of a great change. A well-prepared heart has the golfer, the like of which, as Horace says, hopes in the worst fortune, and in prosperity fears a change in the chances. Give it that the man has golfed above his true ability, and how he does fear that the next game may put him back again; but here again there is buoyant hope in evidence, and when the evening is filled with the exaltation of it, how sweet it is to wander a little over the resting, deserted links and mark the places where balls were pitched, and the lines along which fine putts were made, and the points to which play shall be directed when the next round is in the making, perhaps the best of all.

So it is hope and hope all the way through the golfer’s life, and it is the most joyous, the most uplifting of all the instincts, and the most intensely human, and that which is given to man alone. It is because golf strikes always this chord in his nature that it makes the strong appeal to him. There is no other game or sport that permits him to hope through failure in the same way, that leads him on, coaxes him, cajoles him, even fools him. And this drama of the emotions of the individual is played always in the most perfect setting for such a simple human play—the sea and green fields and plain earth, and the simplest tools to move a little white ball, not along marked lines or within narrow limits or in protected arenas, but anywhere along that green grass, over the hills and through the valleys and across the streams and rushing rivers, while the wind blows now this way and then that, and the rain pours. All the time the golfer pursues the little ball, alone with plain nature and his human adversary. Here he is released from all the conventionalities of mind that hold him in his other doings in this complicated civilisation. The primitive instincts are in command; they have the fields and the sea for harmony in the scene, and the golfer is away from all the intricacies of the twentieth century, and is the simple man and the hopeful man.

That is a fair creed concerning the command of golf, and we may reject the theory that indomitable, persevering mankind finds the fascination of the game merely in the failures and irritations that it brings and in the desire to overcome them. The activity of that instinct of hope is the mystic charm, and surely it is to the credit of a game that it should teach the man to look forward with courage and cheerfulness, and to be always something of an optimist, and the more of it the better for his game. These things lead to the making of a good man as well as a good golfer.

II

Men of other races, whose skins are not white, are afoot with this game. Black men are playing; yellow men are becoming expert; red men have achieved great skill. A few years since a golfer traveller found his way to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, and he saw the wild Red Indian at golf, and thought that it suited him better than his old game of lacrosse. Spotted Horse drove off along the prairie—a plain prairie with only a few shrubs about—and he followed and played the ball for a couple of miles to the turn, and then played it back. There were no holes; the game was to play the course in the fewest strokes. Here, indeed, is the primitive golf. Some of the Indians are said to have made fine drives—as good as the best that white men do—and this was all the more remarkable inasmuch as it is the Red Indians’ pretty custom to yell and howl in a frightful chorus while one of their number is addressing the ball preparatory to making his stroke. So it does not seem easy to put the red men off.

Golf, indeed, is the one world game; it is in essence that very simple sport which so easily and certainly spreads over the planet. Everywhere the British are pioneers, and they are by far the more numerous players; but native proselytes are coming in fast in almost every quarter of the globe, so now it may fairly be said that no other game is being played everywhere by so many different sorts of people as this game of ours. Sit on a magic carpet and be transported to any place, and there, somewhere about you, will be a golf course.

I have lately had some talk with men from the East, who tell of the good game that half-naked tribesmen, standing and walking in bare feet, have learned to play; and, moreover, of the beautiful clubs, most exquisitely finished and sometimes inlaid with ivory and fancy woods, that they have made. I am assured that the “professional champion of Ceylon” is a Cingalese caddie who holds the record for the Ridgeway course, made when he was playing against a British golfer of thoroughly good class. The Japanese are beginning to play, and good judges have been led to express fears that their qualities and temperaments will bring them to a higher state of perfection in the short game than has ever been attained before, and which will surely threaten the supremacy of the white man. Golfing at Kobe is a peculiar experience. The course is at Rokkosan, on the top of a high mountain, and you must therefore climb the mountain before you can golf on the course. You 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 the tees and the bunkers come into view. Those who play there hold that the view from this course is the finest from any, though it can hardly be better than that from the course on the top of Senchal Hill at Darjeeling, for from here there is Kingenjunga, 28,000 feet high, to be seen, and from the summit of Tiger Hill, overlooking the course, there is Mount Everest itself in view.

And there is golf in China too, six clubs for it. We had no sooner come to the conclusion and officially announced some years ago that Wei-hai-wei was a very desirable resort, than the golf club was duly established there. In these days the building prospector first settles upon his golf course, and advertises it, and then he builds his houses round about; and in the same way it is realised that it is the proper thing when seeking to make a new centre of Europeans abroad to start with a golf course. I have been with men on shipboard who, having golfed on the queer course of Tangier, have then speculated unceasingly in the smoke-room as we sailed along the smooth waters of the West African coast about the kind of golf that would be vouchsafed to them on reaching the Canary Islands. Some time since I had a letter from a highly-placed British official at Chinkiang on the Yangtse River, and he told me how they had just begun to play the game out there on a new course which was covered with crater-like excrescences. These are Chinese graves, and they are said to make most excellent hazards. There are pig-tailed fellows for caddies, and it was carefully ascertained that no Chinese sentiment is injured in the matter.

There are golf clubs in all the States of Europe. There are very many in France, and there are more each year, and it is remarkable that the Frenchman is now establishing them for his exclusive use. At Boulogne the Englishman and his friends of France golf together on a course where some of the hazards were the earthworks of Napoleon’s camp—the camp that held the Grand Army that lay in readiness for the invasion of Britain. What irony is here—that the British golfer should play over the Emperor’s camp! The Master-General must himself have walked many times over the lines of our tee shots, and the shadow of the monument that he built to commemorate his invasion of Albion, almost lies across the course from which Albion herself, uninvaded, may be seen. And the Mayor of Boulogne gives prizes to the British golfers who make the best golf on Napoleon’s camp. I come to realise the depth of the meaning of the lines cut into a marble tablet that I saw on the side of a staircase in the Museum at Boulogne one day—“France and England have more good sense than all the world,” and those lines were put on the stone more than sixty years ago.

France is fair and free, but the game is played in Europe where the times and conditions are not at all the same. There is golf in Russia, and to it there was added a new course but recently. At the first thought it seems a little odd that such a peaceful game should be played in holy and revolutionary Russia even by Britishers. They have had two courses in Russia for a long time past—one near Moscow and the other at Mourino, a small village a few versts out from St. Petersburg. The men who play here are of a hardy, determined strain, fine men for pioneers. To get their golf they have to drive thirteen miles out from the capital over bad roads; and in order to obtain a fair amount of satisfaction from their game they have to returf their putting greens almost every year, owing to the extreme sandiness of the soil. The Kaiser is encouraging the game in Germany, and has given prizes for it; there are eight clubs in Italy; and others in Austria, Holland, Belgium, and all the rest. The game has flourished for twelve years past in the dominions of the Sultan of Turkey, that is to say at Bagdad, and the golfers there are pleased to tell you that their course is no miniature affair as are so many at the outposts of the empire of St. Andrews, but that it consists of full eighteen holes, and that, in the desert, they are very sporting indeed.

It goes without saying that the game flourishes greatly in all the Colonies. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the others there are little booms of golf in progress, each of its own kind. At Pretoria and at many places at the Cape the greens consist of diamondiferous gravel, smooth and sparkling, and the first local rule of the Kimberley Club startles the newly-arrived golfer from the homeland, for it tells him that “It shall be lawful for a player to level the ground on the putting green in any manner he pleases.” In India there are some forty flourishing clubs, and that at Calcutta, with its five hundred members and two courses of nine holes each, having been established for nearly eighty years, takes rank as one of the premier clubs of the world. There is the Aden Club in Arabia, the Royal Bangkok in Siam, where an old and very imposing Siamese temple does duty for clubhouse, and others all over Asia, as one might almost say. There are many golf clubs in the Argentine Republic and the other South American States. The Sandwich Islands are full of the game, for there are five clubs there. In the East Indies there are three, and in the West Indies there are eight. Wherever the Britisher goes he leaves his trail of golf behind him. There is a story of Captain Adair holding a golf competition in his camp when pitched on one of the passes leading into Thibet, at a height of sixteen thousand feet above the sea-level. I have no information about the game having been played in the North Polar regions; but I am told that when the recent British Antarctic Expedition was made in the Discovery, the Commander, Captain Scott, who is a keen golfer, took some clubs down there with him, and in some leisure moments “had a knock,” by way of reminding him of the old links at home, and of seeing what the sensation of South Polar golf was like. It is said that forged iron has a peculiarly cold and numbing touch in the frozen south.

It is the same game everywhere, and the law is always taken from Fifeshire; but the conditions and makeshifts are sometimes peculiar. We have said how at the Cape they putt on gritty earth that smacks of diamonds, how in China there are graves for bunkers, and how across the Channel, Napoleon’s trenches serve for the same purpose. Boulogne, after all, is only in the nature of a corollary to our courses at Walton Heath and Huntercombe, for hereabouts the golfers play where the legions of mighty Cæsar were encamped, and the stables and the kitchens that Cæsar made, huge pits deep in the earth, are in the line of play, and things are so arranged that they constitute fine traps for erring balls, and offer remunerative opportunities for skill with iron clubs in playing out of them. And yet, if one must play bad shots, it is well that they should be played in the direction in which Cæsar dug, for these pits were made so long ago and are so deep that they are often beautifully turfed with soft springy stuff, which anywhere except in a pit would be a delight to play from, being so congenial to one’s iron. We must applaud the Romans in this matter. It is nearly a pleasure to go into their kitchens and stables; they were made so long ago and they are so green and nice. There is golf at Old Calabar on the West Coast of Africa, and there the putting “greens” are made of fine coal dust. So they are “blacks.” At Mexico and many other places they are merely “browns.” In Egypt, where there is much golf, they are often made of rolled and baked Nile mud.

It is not necessary to say that there is nearly as much golf played in America as there is in Britain, and that the time may possibly come when there will be more. But it is not generally appreciated on what old-established foundations American golf is played. The game has traditions in America now, even as in Britain. In the archives of American golf there is still preserved a document which shows how little of a new thing is the game in the United States. It is an invitation, reading as follows: “Golf Club Ball.—The honour of Miss Eliza Johnston’s company is requested to a ball, to be given by the members of the golf club of this city, at the Exchange, on Tuesday evening, the 31st inst., at seven o’clock. (Signed) Geo. Woodruff, Robert Mackay, Jno. Caig, Jas. Dickson, Managers; Geo. Hogarth, Treasurer. Savannah, twentieth December 1811.” The original is in the possession of the granddaughter of the recipient. There seems to be some suggestion that these pioneers of American golf were of Scottish origin, as pioneers of the game until lately mostly were, and it might be appropriate to mention that Savannah, whose people are said to be celebrated for their love of pleasure, piety, and sport, has in it the oldest theatre in the United States, while it also claims to have started the first Sunday school in the world, founded by Wesley and perpetuated by Whitefield. If it started here, this was not a bad place for American golf to start at.

III

Rulers, statesmen, diplomatists, begin to take more serious account of the sport-loving factor in human nature than has been their wont. Downing Street, Washington, the Quai d’Orsay, and all the other nerve-centres of international affairs, where there are housed all the cleverest modern masters of opportunism, have entered upon the study of its peculiarities and tendencies, recognising that here is an instrument of the most delicate perfection for the cultivation of amity between people and people when the bureaucrats have set the lead. The British Empire is being soldered up with sport. Besides the constant visits of Colonial cricketers, have we not had with us recently two separate detachments of Colonial footballers, and has it not been evident that while the Colonial Governments have given their representatives the most open and material support, even to the extent of voting them certain supplies, Downing Street has smiled approvingly, and has, now and again, when not many people were looking, given a pleasant little pat to the wheel of friendship as it went rolling along from Cornwall to Edinburgh, and from Blackheath to Dublin? And was it not an open secret that the “very highest influences” were brought to bear upon the controlling authorities, with a view to avoiding the recent breakage in the regular sequence of Anglo-Australian encounters on the cricket field? The entente cordiale with France is being promoted from a toy model to a big machine that is working in the streets, largely as the result of the awakening of popular sympathies by such means as games. All the congruous elements of different countries far apart are being attracted to each other, as if magnetically, by such influences as the motor car, the bicycle, cricket, football, and, far from least, by golf: and the potency of these charms lies in the fact that when they are set to work, men’s minds are relaxed from the general materialistic sternness of their business times, and the humanity in them is asserting itself.

Now, all those good men who take the cosmopolitan view of human happiness must see that among all games with powers like this there can be none of greater adaptability and general use and efficiency than golf. It may be, and is used by people of every colour, race, creed, and temperament, in every climate and all the year round. No recreation, apart from the simplest contests of the river and field, has ever been so universal since the world began, with the single exception of chess. And wherever and whenever it is played it extends its benign influence towards the promotion of fast friendship among the players. There is no freemasonry like the freemasonry of golf. To its temples in every land are always welcomed the faithful and earnest craftsman from where’er he came, and he is passed on the signs of the bag and the stance and the little pimpled ball. For it is one of the articles of belief that no man can be a good and enthusiastic golfer of experience and at the same time a thoroughly bad fellow, for at the outset of his career the bad fellow would never be happy in his game; others would not help to make him so, and he would either be stung by the consciousness of his own defects and reform, or he would slip away into the small silent pitiable minority who leave the links one day never to return. Thus has our happy game of golf wound a bright cordon round the world, and so does she play her part in the great evolution of general contentment.

IV

“In spring,” we have been told in the Georgics, “heat returns to the bones.” And the blood runs eagerly through the golfer’s veins. April and May are the months of hope and of exultation. There is joy in the present, in the showers and the sunshine, and a great joy in prospect in the future. Each true golfer is a lover of Nature, and something of a philosopher, and at this season, as at no other, when he gets wakened on a bright morning and sees the country clean and fresh, and coming again into bright green and many colours, while the birds sing at allegro and fortissimo, a deep pleasure fills his being, the pleasure of spring. He is alive, alive; and it is fine to be alive. Summer is glorious, autumn is beautiful, cold winter has charms for those who have proper feeling for it; but spring, the Germinal, is surely Nature’s favourite season, and the golfer must always love his spring.

It gives him hope and thought. Change always induces reflection, and here we have the change of the seasons, and a little of all of them in a short space of time. An old proverb says that “April borrows three days of March, and they are ill.” But as often she borrows several days of May, and they are warm and sunny, and so hereabouts we have the winds, and the showers, and the sunshine; and who can walk on the links to-day and not think something of what the rain has been doing, and what the winds have done, and what the sun is doing and is going to do? Here they are all together, great master wonders to be thought much of. They are much to all men; everything to the sportsman and the folks of the outdoor life.

The sun and the rain are in such daily association in the days of the sportsman’s spring, and more than ever is he inclined at this season to give some passing thought to the phenomena of Nature, that one comes to wonder sometimes whether he reflects as he might do on the eternal exchange, how the drops of water that the sun takes up from the fields over which he tramps, the golf links that he plays over, the rivers and streams that he fishes, are every one of them placed back again, perhaps not on the same fields or in the same rivers, but in some field or river somewhere. The bare fact is one of elementary knowledge; but its extensions are not so much so, and are interesting to think upon. If the sun always gave back to each particular sportsman the rain that it had taken away from his own playing fields and rivers, how dull would his life be from the knowledge of what the weather and the seasons had certainly for him in the future? With the caprice of the clouds and the wind there is no such even and regular return of that which was taken away. The golf links of the Lothians may be kept rained upon and moist so that the turf is the most perfect, all with the rain that was sucked up from the courses of the south coast of England, round about Deal and Sandwich and Rye; and surely when the links in the south are parched, and when they are green and moist in the north, we must think of that.

V

It behoves every earnest golfer to keep a match-book in which there shall be faithfully recorded the results, with some particulars, of all the matches whatsoever that he shall play in the course of each season. Yet it is likely that not more than two or three golfers in every club, if indeed so many, keep such a record of the golf that they have played, which is sinking away into the forgotten history of their golfing lives. The idea of the private match-book may have occurred to many golfers, who, on a careful consideration of the circumstances of the case, have rejected it, though it goes without saying that the chief reason for the absence of the book in the majority of cases is simple neglect. Those who deliberately avoid the intellectual pleasures of the match-book do so either because they conceive that there is something namby-pamby in the thing, and that it savours too much of the keeping of a little diary which so few people know how to keep, consequently degenerating into a record of the trivial acts instead of the life-governing thoughts; or they are deterred by the fact that there are no such books with ruled columns ready for the purpose which are at all agreeable to their ideas as to what a match-book ought to be. Certainly there is no ready-ruled match-book; the little things to fit the waistcoat pocket are hopelessly inadequate, and really are only fit for doll’s golf, so that it is one of the things to wonder at that there are still apparently some thousands of golfers—beginners for the most part, you may be sure—who buy these trifles year by year.

But perhaps it is as well that there is no stereotyped form of match-book, to which we might be persuaded to attach ourselves with some misgivings as to its form, and the irritation that would be caused us in the future by the attempt to fill up constantly one particular column that might seem to be either unnecessary or suggestive of indelicate revelations. You will not find the ideas of many men in agreement as to what ought to go down in the book and what ought not. One will want spaces reserved for full particulars as to wind and weather, of the ball with which he played, and of the many other little details of varying importance, forming the sum of the circumstance of the day’s golf. Another will have a horror of such conceits, and will limit his confessions to statements of the date, the opponent, and the result. As in other matters, the medium is the happiest choice; but the difference of taste which could not be accommodated by so many different varieties of match-book, suggests at once that the proper course to pursue is for each player to purchase a perfectly plain book and rule it off in so many columns to his own satisfaction; or even, indeed, for the sake of a neater and less formal appearance, and an arrangement which is more accommodating, leave it blank, and let the facts of the match be inserted in order, just as the man is disposed to insert them at the time of the entry. Then a blank column will not in after years convey any reproach in the matter of a possible suppression of the truth, nor one overcrowded tell too much a tale of despondency and excuse on the one hand, or on the other of that boastfulness that comes not well from the heart of a good golfer.

Now the beginning and the continuation of a match-book is a serious matter, and the golfer will do well to come to an understanding with himself beforehand as to the policy that he will pursue in regard to it. It is essential that the strictest truth, and all the essential truth, should at all times be set down, and it is only a simple extension of the principle involved that if any matches are to be recorded they must all be so. The chronicler of the time must not consider himself as historian, and set himself to discriminate between what is important and what is trivial; for, as in all things, it will be many years hence, when the matters have been well sifted in the cold recollection of the mind, before such a determination can be accurately made. Therefore it is the duty of the chronicler to state the full facts, that is to say, as full as he determined they should ever be according to his system of match-book keeping, and he must leave it to himself in after years, when, the chronicler now exalted to the student of his own history, he can ponder over the statements in his leisure and make such judgments upon them as he is disposed. Thus it is of the essence of the proper making of such match-books that no fault of the maker at any time or in any game shall be in any way extenuated, and that nothing to the discredit of the opponent shall be set down maliciously, so that in days to come, when the player shall have advanced many more seasons towards the end of his golf, in turning over these pages and with their honest help fighting his matches over again, he shall truly behold “the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.” So it seems that the best match-book should rightly be a strictly private thing; if it were meant as a book for the table or any other place where it might be exposed to the gaze of the curious, there might at some time come a reluctance to the owner to state in full the truth of the day’s play, since the honest criticism of a partner in a foursome or of an opponent, to some who did not understand, might not appear so necessary as was actually the case. This faithful record should be kept under lock and key, and it should be taken with him when the golfer goes far afield for play which is to last more than a day, and the entries should be made on the night of each day. It will be soon enough for others to pry into this confessional when the golfer who whispered into it at nights is no more. That such present labour will afford a rich sequence of future pleasure there can be no doubt. Just as there are no friends like the old friends, and no wine like the old wine, so one is sometimes disposed to fancy that there is no golf like the old golf that is now indeed but a memory, and one often much too dim at that. The match-book will refresh the mind to the recollection of dear friends with whom one is no longer associated, and of fine sport that one had with them on days when the thrills of life seemed to be a little quicker than they are now. By the mention of an incident, and occasionally by giving the score of a few holes, much of the whole game, shot and shot, is conjured up in the memory in all its keenness and its tensity.

And it shall come as a good recommendation in this matter that the golfer who is the favourite hero of us all, as he was a pattern of the golfing virtues, made a match-book for himself while he was still playing the schoolboy golf, and kept it continuously for the rest of his time. Freddie Tait’s match-book was just what we might expect it to be. It was a very honest thing, and Mr. Low, who has handled it and copied some of it for the deep interest of us all, remarks on the way in which the brave soldier golfer never spared himself, his partner, nor his opponents, but dealt out praise and censure with a level hand. One day, though he had halved his round, he says, “Played as bad a round as possible”; and at another time his comment is, “Never played worse with the exception of a few iron shots.” Then as to a foursome it is, “The characteristic of the game was the bad play of both”; and of his partner in another match he remarks, “The play of Mr. —— was feeble in the extreme.”

There were eight column divisions in Tait’s match-book. First there was the place for the date, then for the name of the links, and the third for the statement of the parties to the match. The fourth column was for the mention of the odds of the handicap if any, or for the name of the competition if he was engaged in one. Then there was one column for holes won and another for holes lost, a broad one for “remarks,” and a last little one at the side of the page for the total of the score. Generally the “remarks” were brief and pointed, and it is these which make the record of the play of the most beloved golfer we have known so real and human, so that it is a pleasure to sit by the fire and create some fancies of these matches. Now and then there is a little humour; here and there a touch of sarcasm at the expense of “F. G. T.,” as he generally referred to himself. Round by round there is the full story of the way in which he won the championship at Sandwich, and the next entry concerns the very next match that he played, which was the day after at Rye, when, with his honours new upon him, he essayed the task of playing the best ball of Mr. H. S. Colt and Mr. J. O. Fairlie. The remarks run: “H. S. C. and J. O. F. too strong for the golfed-out Champion, to whom they showed no mercy. H. S. C. and J. O. F. both played a good game and did some very fine holes.” Here there is a 6 in the “Lost” column, and it is a notable thing that this, on 23rd May, was the first figure that had appeared in this column of defeat since 16th April, though golf was being played almost every day. In his comments on the final of that same championship he twice pays compliments to the pluck of Mr. Hilton, who in the game was very soon left without the [slightest] chance of victory, and was beaten by a full eight holes. The gods would never permit the favourite Freddie to be beaten by the finest player of his time, and that player now refers to his early engagements with the soldier as the day when Tait “commenced his career as the slaughterer of Hilton.” Another day we find Freddie revelling in two glorious matches with Andrew Kirkaldy on the new course at St. Andrews. In the morning he lost by a couple of holes, but in the afternoon he was the winner on the last green. “Another splendid match,” he rejoices; “both in great form. F. G. T. only halved the third hole by carelessly moving his ball with hand while removing a piece of grass. The hole was played out and won by F. G. T., but he had, of course, to lose a stroke, according to the rules of golf. This unfortunate accident made the difference of one hole. A. K., 80, a magnificent score. F. G. T., in: 4 3 5 4 4 4 5 4 4 = 37.” Here is another comment, “R. T. B. very fair. Self good at first, but got too many up, and then got careless, with the usual result.” He lost that match by a hole. Another time, when he was playing the best of two balls, he wrote: “Played badly. The two balls also bad.” That match was fittingly halved. In this way we can follow the happy Freddie all the way through the spring and summer to the end of the year on all the best links that are to be found, and these judgments of his will serve as models to other men who in this small matter would copy the methods of the perfect golfer.

There is this entry in the match-book alongside the date 31st July 1888, concerning a match with Mr. Norman Playfair: “Driving very poor. Put a ball through a man’s hat and had to pay five shillings.” Young Freddie, then only eighteen years of age, went to old Tom Morris to complain of his ill-luck in the matter, but Tom answered him wisely, “Ah, Master Freddie, ye may be vera thankful that it’s only a hat, and no’ an oak coffin ye hae to pay for.” Even now, when the sad happenings of the South African War, which at the time so wrung our heart-strings with misery, have been somewhat mellowed by time, the great consoler, it is impossible to glide into this channel of reminiscence without feeling that the pleasure of it is touched with melancholy that the body that held that noble soul should be resting among the trees by the banks of the Riet River.

VI

There is nothing like the winds of March for testing the golfer in every department of his play. Quite timid golfers are sometimes heard to say that they don’t mind rain; but if a man does not mind big winds, regards them both from the sporting and scientific standpoints, and manages to make some respectable golf while they are in charge of the air, he is a worthy player, and he may make his mark some day. It often happens that you can apply test after test to two different golfers, and they will both answer equally to them; but the wind test will separate them at once. The man who can play the real game in a high wind, and use it to his advantage at every opportunity, knows golf as others do not. He is a finished player, and he rather likes the days of March for the rich sport that they afford—the real big game of the links. The other man, when he hears the wind playing like a German band round the side of the house as he tries to get himself off to sleep at night, thinks to himself that he will have to give up the idea of golf in the morning. He should not. Even if he never learns the scientific treatment of wind in golf, he would find his game improved generally and made more powerful by playing it at times like these under severe difficulties, and it is worth playing in a wind if only to taste the sweet joys of golfing in a calm afterwards, just as there is one point of satisfaction in getting wet through on the links because the change afterwards is so delicious.

You always find that a golfer is very much the better for a short season on a very windy course. When he goes back to his home course, very likely inland and protected, driving seems such a simple, easy thing, and he lets out at his tee shots with a freedom and a certainty which make for a greater boldness and strength in his game. North Berwick is one of the windiest courses. You do get wind there in the spring months, and there are hundreds of golfers who testify to the good that a short stay there has done to their game. They have simply got to learn to golf in all kinds of winds. It is like throwing a non-swimmer into seven feet of water with only a thin piece of rope round his middle. He very soon invents a way of making greater security and comfort for himself. Stay at North Berwick long enough, and it may affect your style for life. Mr. Robert Maxwell has a peculiar punching, but withal very powerful style, which is attributed to his upbringing at North Berwick. A man disposed to probe very deep down for causes and effects might arrive at the conclusion that the reason why, speaking very generally, there are better players and better courses, and more of each on the east coast of Scotland than on the west, is because it happens that the links there are more exposed, and there are more windy days upon them than on those on the other side of the country. Not that there are not big winds very frequently to be dealt with in the neighbourhood of Troon and Prestwick, which surely have their full share, and it was at a championship at Prestwick that old Willie Park delivered himself of his famous remark, “Guid God! When I get ma club up I canna get it doon again!” so strongly was the wind blowing on that occasion.

VII

In the spring the professionals come tumbling on to the stage of golf once more with their happy welcome cry, “Here we are again.” Sometimes in the middle of the summer season people are apt to say that we get at least enough of these professional competitions, and that it would be agreeable if we had a little more time to think of our own golf in all its varied charm, instead of our attention being invited day by day to the many permutations and combinations of “the quartette” in exhibition matches, and the aspirations of such as Jones among those next to them. But what a dull season it would be if Vardon and Braid were not up against Taylor and Herd somewhere or other—it does not matter where—just as in the olden time, or Herd and Braid did not show once again at the little course of Slocum-on-Mudbury that there was something wrong with their running in that never-to-be-forgotten foursome when four hundred sovereigns were at stake. And then when Rowland Jones is included in one of these foursome combinations, we say, quite pleased, “Ha, Jones is coming on! Jones is going to assert himself!” One day Jack White is in again—that happy-hearted Jack, who came by a great championship in 1904 at Sandwich, where records were falling in every round—and then we say to ourselves very good-naturedly, “I hope Jack will get on to his drive again in one of these matches!” Or the fourth man may be Tom Vardon, and that is very interesting, because Tom is a great big sportsman who is stuffed tight with the effervescing joy of life. If it is Andrew Kirkaldy, as it is occasionally, we rub our hands and observe, “Grand matchplayer is Sam! Now we shall see how a foursome should be played! Good as the best is Sam!”

The fact of the matter is, that these professional matches and competitions are now a fast and integral part of our golfing system. We may think that we could do without them, and in the summer-time we rail constantly against them, and say that they never would be missed. But how we should miss them! Golfing life would not be the same if there were not occasions to make such almost daily observations as those just quoted. The season would be without salt, and our little amateur combats would seem to be lacking in an unknown stimulus that was always there before.

Then what a void in golfing life would there be if there were not constant occasion to express admiration for the supremacy and the prowess of the triumvirate—Harry Vardon, Braid, and Taylor. When we are too frequently told of the achievement and the skill of the heroes of the olden time, it is well to think of what the triumvirate has done and still can do. Perhaps not many golfers, even among those who pay faithful attention to such matters, have a proper sense of the amazing record of these three men. I had occasion to analyse it lately, and I believe not in any other sport have the periods of three such champions coincided as they have done in golf during the last few years. It is a strange thing that the fates should have pitchforked Braid, Vardon, and Taylor into the arena at the same time, each man being so much above all outside the three. It is as if Ormonde, Donovan, and Flying Fox had been in the same race for the Derby. In one sense it seems a waste of exceptional talent on one period, to the possible impoverishment of another, but golf spectators and players should appreciate the advantage of the times in which they live, for it is unlikely that three such golfers will ever be to the fore at the same time again after these three have gone their way, and it is as certain as anything that a hundred years from now the golf world will speak reverently of the great triumvirate of the early days of the twentieth century. It will certainly be remembered that after this triumvirate had been established eleven years in each other’s company, they wound up a championship first, second, and third against the biggest field that had ever contested a championship, this being at Muirfield in 1906.

Three times in those eleven years the triumvirate collectively achieved the highest possible distinction in this way, the first being in 1900, which was Taylor’s year, the second in 1901, when Braid won, and the third in 1906, when Braid was again successful. Taylor was the first of the three to show activity, and he won the championship in 1894 and 1895. Not until 1896 was the triumvirate definitely constituted, as it were, by the whole three, Vardon, Taylor, and Braid appearing in the championship at the same time. In that year Vardon finished first, Taylor second, and Braid sixth. In the following year Braid, in the second place in the lists, was the foremost man of the three. Then there was a remarkable run, for the triumvirate found the winner in seven of the next nine years. Vardon scored twice running to begin with; then Taylor and Braid; in 1902 Vardon and Braid tied for second place; the next year Vardon was first again; Taylor and Braid tied for second position in 1904, and this was followed by two championships for Braid. Only three times in eleven years did the triumvirate let the championship go out of their small circle, and it may be mentioned that the three men who beat them on these respective occasions were Mr. Hilton in 1897, Herd in 1902, and Jack White in 1904.

Adding up the records of positions and scores of all golfers who took part in these championship competitions when the triumvirate did, and making, so to speak, one long championship of it, the triumvirate lead the way, and the rest—the very best of them—are absolutely tailed off. The scores registered in the championships, added up, afford the following result: Harry Vardon, 3426; James Braid, 3446; J. H. Taylor, 3454. Herd fittingly comes fourth with 3527, and then there is an enormous gap between him and the fifth man. Taylor would, of course, be in a different position if we counted in the two early championships that he won, and let it be said for Taylor that, including this year of 1907, he has been second for the championship four times in succession and five in all—a magnificent record such as stamps him as the most brilliantly consistent champion of all time. But it is a heartbreaking record for Taylor all the same, and this great and [popular] player has all golfers’ sympathy.

Golfers are not like the brooks of poets; they cannot go on for ever. We shall look to see the great men of to-day playing fine golf in twenty years from now, and upon occasion they will play such rounds as will make us say, “That was just as in the olden time!” But their average of merit must diminish, and probably all the premier three, or at least two of them, have passed the high-water mark of their ability and their tide of supremacy is receding. Who, then, is to succeed them? For years past we have been looking for likely and worthy successors. There are many fine golfers on the links, and occasionally great things are prophesied of some of them; but disappointment almost invariably follows. The times do not seem to be breeding any more Vardons, Taylors, or Braids. A triumvirate of the future is not yet in the making. Our grandparents and other good people constantly tell us that there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and it might seem a foolish thing to suggest that we shall never again have such a band of supreme artists at the game as those whose works we enjoy witnessing in these days. But are not the chances heavily against there being again in our time simultaneously three more men of such outstanding ability as these three, each one of whom would be the sole man of his generation if it were not for the other two? Cricket did not produce three Graces at the same time; billiards had only one Roberts. You could not imagine three Graces and three Roberts. But we have had them in golf in late years.

One is inclined to think that the fact is that the men who are great to-day were trained in a severer and more heroic school than their successors will be, and they had each a spark of genius which the conditions of the time fanned into the full flame of glory. We cannot expect three more of them to come along at the same time; but we might expect and do want one more, someone who shall be an acknowledged chief of the game, someone whom we shall be glad to see win the championship, as we cannot be so glad when it is won by a golfer than whom there is no one more unlikely ever to win it again. I am no believer in these things going in a round of comparative mediocrity. What seems to be the matter with most modern aspirants is that they have not that touch of genius which is so evidently possessed by the men who have been making golfing history during the past decade. They may drive well, play their irons well, putt well, and they may do many grand holes and accomplish numerous brilliant rounds, breaking many records. At times they may beat the champions and past champions. But they are not the same golfers. Watch them play a round and you can see the difference. They have not the same genius. They are merely ordinary human golfers, though good ones at that; they are palpably suffering too much from mere human weakness. You see them trying hard, trying so very hard. The triumvirate do not seem to try. It is just there. There is one of them who tries less than any golfer who has ever been born, and he does more when trying less than those others trying hard. Yes, it is just there—the genius for the game.

VIII

We may set it down with some conviction that William Shakespeare was a born golfer. It does not matter that golf was as rare in the glorious days in which he lived as are eagles in twentieth-century Britain. We do not say that he played golf, had seen it played, or had ever heard of it. So far as we are aware, there is no evidence to support any such propositions. Yet he was a born golfer, and if the game had come his way he would have played it, and one doubts not that he would also have excelled in it; so that it is well that it was after his time, or England would not have been proud in the possession of such work of his as is the envy of all other nations. For, of all the classic writers whose work we read, there is none who gives such evidence in almost every line of it that he was possessed of a perfectly ideal golfing temperament, of a philosophy that seems constantly to have a subtle and most perfect application to the life of the links. Through and through it is the real golfer’s philosophy, that which is the best suited to the intensity of the game, to its deep humanity, and that which serves for the complete appreciation and full joy of the game. You may read all the other poets, from Homer and Virgil to Byron and Tennyson, without ever a thought of the links obtruding upon your study; but it is no evidence of a vagrant mind, or one that is indifferent to the sweetest music of words, that not three consecutive minutes can hardly ever be spent in reaching Shakespearian lines without the fancy being touched by the perfection of the philosophy and sentiment when applied to the peculiar pleasures and pains of the golfer.

Only one other classic writer with whom we are familiar can give such solace to the troubled player, such wise counsel to him who errs or is in doubt, such chastening admonitions to those who have offended against the spirit of the game and whose consciences are disturbed. That is Marcus Aurelius, and we pass on the volume of his rules of life to all those players who from time to time seek their homes at night weary and depressed after a day on the links, when all has been for the worst and despair broods darkly over the soul. After all, the golfer who is indifferent to the ills he sometimes, nay often, suffers, and can in an hour completely forget the tragedies of two rounds, is somewhat too phlegmatic, and there will always be denied to him the higher ecstasies by which the men of finer and more nervous temperament are uplifted. We do not set it against a man that when he has done discredit to his capabilities, he should show many signs of inward turmoil and display much active vexation towards innocent persons and things on seeking his home. He may rail against the arrangements of his household, and he may appear peevish to the members of his family, and find new faults in their manners and conduct. If they are the kind, sympathetic people that they so often are, they will bear with him and wait patiently for the passing of the cloud. On the morrow the good game may be back in all its fulness and richness, and then at eventide there will trip lightly homewards a happy and withal a penitent golfer, who will not be slow to confess his fault and to make a full measure of amends. The colour of life will have changed from the dull grey to the red of roses. And how much thinner and poorer would be the days of our golfing life did they not contain such constant change and yield to us such a variety of emotion! But it is the days of sorrow rather than the days of gladness that teach us the great lessons that all worthy golfers should learn, and they should not neglect the cultivation of the philosophic spirit for which the best opportunities are then afforded. So it is likely the stricken player may find a deep and wholesome contemplation in his lonely privacy at the end of the day, by meditating with Marcus Aurelius on the morals of life and events. He will tell you that “you have suffered a thousand inconveniences from not being contented with performing what your capacity was given you to perform,” and so, by such a little hint as this, he will lead you home to the simple truth that your proper game is not your best game, and that much of the misery that obtains in the world of golf is due to the universal habit of too high appraisement of the quality of one’s play.

But it is Shakespeare who teaches us best to be good golfers, and the secret of the perfect application of his sentiment and philosophy to the golfer’s life is that his writings are so intensely human, and that of all the diversions of man there is none that so much stirs in him the simple instincts, reduces him to the simplest human elements. A round of golf will sometimes bare faults and qualities in a man that have been hidden from the time of their formation in his early years. It is to the man who constantly undergoes this fierce analysis that Shakespeare will most appeal. Let the golfer test his text and see the perfection of the result. The quotation selected for the first day of the year for a Shakespearean calendar that was hung up in a golfer’s den was—

“Like a bold champion, I assume the lists,
Nor ask advice of any other thought
But faithfulness, and courage.”

Could [a] golfer take a better motto?

IX

No class of man looks forward to the spring with keener anticipation than the golfer. Overburdened with his winter’s discontent, he fancies it as a time of sunshine, of dry courses, of sprouting young grass that holds up the ball on the suburban links and gives us the first good brassey lies that we have had for some months, of the frequent retirement of the energetic worm, of the quickening of the greens, of the leafing of the trees and the hedgerows, and the brightening of the face of Nature. The golfer is generally a strongly human man, who is not careless of natural beauties as are too many in these increasingly prosaic and strenuous days. Perhaps he likes the coming of the springtime best of all, because he is then enabled to play his game in the best degree of comfort. He is less hampered with heavy clothing, and his hands and wrists keep warm without any cumbersome artificial assistance. And then also he is persuaded, and he is evidently right, that the balls fly very much better in the spring sunshine than they ever did through the heavy and often murky atmosphere of the winter days. Even the golf ball welcomes the coming of spring, and given that it is properly struck it gets a better and longer flight through the air when it is dry and light, and it runs better on the dry turf when it comes down, so that the player finds himself being given encouragement that helps him wonderfully on to his game. And so the man who usually goes by the name of the Average Golfer believes all through every autumn and winter that he comes on to his game best of all in the spring, and that that is the only time of the year when he really does play his best, his real game. The only time when he does not believe that he plays his best game in the spring is in the spring.

The fact is that the conditions of springtime are rather made up of a set of contradictions of a very aggravating character, and they often play the devil with the game of this Average Golfer, the system of which is not too firmly consolidated. This person, one takes it, is a man of medium young to middle age, a great enthusiast, of good means, one more or less constantly engaged in business, having a fair number of social obligations to attend to in evenings, and a golfing handicap of somewhere between six and twelve. This man is possibly afflicted with a troublesome liver, and this organ has a peculiar and most aggravating way of asserting itself in the springtime as it has at no other season. Then it is up to all kinds of tricks, the entire physical system of the man is disarranged and thrown out of gear, and the result is that when all Nature is smiling and the larks are piping as though their little throats would burst with the fulness of their melody, the erstwhile hopeful golfer is in a wretched state of mind, trying new stances for his drive, new ways of gripping, a swing much longer or much shorter than usual, and manœuvring with his strokes in all other kinds of ways, in the vain hope that he might be permitted to drive at least as well as he did in January, instead of foundering one ball in three and lifting up one of the others high towards the heavens. But there is compensation in the increased hopefulness of spring. The game may be poor, weaker than it was hoped to be. But it will mend; it will surely mend.

[MEN AND THINGS]

I

For one reason, if not for more, a Liberal Government is popular with golfers of true feeling—because it gives Mr. Arthur Balfour, the ex-Prime Minister, more to the links than when he is burdened with the care of Ministerial office. In the days of the sweet idleness of Opposition we find him at play on a golf links here and on another one there; now opening a new course and delighting the assembled players with a little speech, which is rich in the spirit of the game; and at some other time enjoying a foursome with some old political friend, or with J. H. Taylor or James Braid as his partner. As Mr. Balfour is the better, as he will tell you, for being a golfer, so is golf the happier for his intimate association with it; and some people who do not know and cannot understand, not being of golf, think we make over-much of a statesman’s interest in our pastime, as if the great of the land were not bound closely up with other sports. Good and earnest-minded golfers feel that they are kin to this player, because he is himself a pattern of the man imbued with the best sense of the honour and glory of the game. He is loyal to it, he has the sentiment of it, and he has seen through to the inner recesses of its charm. Thus he is not ashamed, as no good golfer ever is, of abandoning himself entirely to its delights, of setting all his emotions and his thoughts free to race and frolic in the joy of the links, and of allowing the high dignity of the great statesman to sink away into the simple naturalness of the earnest golfer. So we like this late Prime Minister not because of his political rank, but because he loves his game and does his best by it, and is at all times an example to the acolytes who come forward in nervous ignorance of the great meaning of golf.

Then it is less interesting to consider what style of player Mr. Balfour is, than what kind of man he shows himself to be amid the trials and the triumphs of the links, where, it is indisputably held, a man’s entire human nature, despite all efforts at repression, is forced up to the surface for all to see. Here, then, we see the real Mr. Balfour as he is never seen on the Front Bench at Westminster. There are no mashie shots to foozle, and no drives to top into the bunker in the House of Commons, to make a man feel that life is yet a feeble, disappointing thing. To the Parliamentarian, the nearest thing in pleasure to laying a long approach shot “dead” against the hole is a successful speech, or the engineering of a majority on a division which is something above par, and these are dull things in comparison. Mr. Balfour, then, as we have studied him many times at this testing game, is a man of many and quickly changing emotions, of a temperament somewhat highly strung and nervous, and capable of enormous enthusiasms and alternative depressions. There is nothing that is phlegmatic about this Ministerial golfer. There is something of the schoolboy left in him. One day I saw him driving from the tee and getting a beauty, so that his ball was cleanly flicked for the best part of two hundred yards in a straight line to the hole. It is not in human nature to wait for tardy praise in such ecstatic moments, and he, his face aglow with pleasure, turned about to his opponent, exclaiming, “I do push them away, don’t I?”

On the other hand, there are times when he is sadly mindful of failure, and he is much too serious a golfer ever to forget the most evil things he has done. One time we saw him playing in a foursome—his favourite form of golf—with Mr. Eric Hambro as his partner, and after foozling his approach in a deplorable manner, he called out wearily to his partner, “Do you know, Hambro, I once did that kind of thing for a whole fortnight!” It must have been the blackest fortnight in the right honourable gentleman’s career. He is something of a philosopher on the links, and when he makes a bad stroke he sometimes explains how it came about to those who are near him, or to the course and the sky, if he is momentarily isolated. This, indeed, is one of the very few respects in which the Prime Minister falls from what we may regard as the standard of the ideal golfer. He is inclined to reach too hastily at a conclusion, and some say to speak too much. Some masters have held that the perfect golfer plays in absolute silence, and Mr. Balfour is not an absolutely silent golfer, though in his case he is none the less earnest. It has been stated that never on the links does he make use of any other ejaculation than “Dear me!” but this statement, besides being untrue, is absurd, and is not complimentary to him as a golfer. Let him miss a shot or do anything which he ought not to have done, and the human man comes out above the statesman, though, of course, nobody has ever heard Mr. Balfour commit himself to any unbecoming remark. But in the production of effect from the minor expletives he is most skilful. “Botheration!” is the commonest of his ejaculations, and as he says it whilst witnessing the descent of his little white ball into a yawning bunker, one, as an old golfer, sometimes realises that the most satisfactory results in this respect are not always produced from the use of the strongest materials. “Oh, this is indeed shocking!” is another favourite form of expression, which, as he says it, speaks a volume upon the agony of the mind.

For the rest he is just a good, determined golfer, who is a first-class sportsman, never giving any quarter on the links, and never expecting any. You never see Mr. Balfour pick up his ball whilst there is still the remotest chance left of his dividing the hole with his opponent, and he would reject with scorn, like every other true golfer, the suggestion that he takes his golf for the sake of the exercise only. It is because he is thus keen that other and better players find it a constant pleasure to match themselves against him, or to become his partner in a foursome. They know then that they are out for golf.

“Big” Crawford, his old-time favourite caddie, who keeps a ginger-beer tent alongside the eighth green at North Berwick, flies the Scottish standard from the top of it when Mr. Balfour is on his most beloved course. A Russian grand duke, who did not know the truth, once naïvely suggested to Crawford that the flag was flying as a compliment to him, the Russian. “Na, na, sir,” said Crawford, “begging your pardon and with great respect, but it’s for one greater than you.”

“Who is looking after Mr. Balfour?” they whispered one time at St. Andrews, when the right hon. gentleman was playing himself into the captaincy of the Royal and Ancient Club, and was then Chief Secretary for Ireland, and regularly attended by plain-clothes detectives in case of accident. “I am looking after Mr. Balfour!” Crawford said when he overheard. “I’m enough.” And he would have been.

II

It should not be set against a golfer for foolishness or faddism that he gives pet names to some of his favourite clubs that have served him well through many hard campaigns, and between him and which there has grown up a very close degree of intimacy, for some of the greatest players have given this rank of name to their trusted clubs. “My driver,” even “My best driver” or “My old driver,” is a cold term to apply to that fine head and shaft that you think have no equals on the links—at least for you. All drivers may be called drivers; shall we have no other name for the champion that has roamed with us and played with us over courses all the way from Dornoch to Westward Ho!? Call him “Bill” if you like, and “Bill” is a very good name; or if your fancy leans that way, and she is slender and whippy, you may call her “Bess.” But better keep to human names. There is a man who calls his baffy “Jumbo,” and it does not seem a nice name. I have a golfing friend who has a driver that he calls “Ephraim,” and it is one of the most wonderful drivers ever seen, with such a long shaft that it needs a giant to wield it, but its owner is something of a giant too. When I hear him ask for Ephraim I know that mighty schemes are afoot, and, straining my eyes to the far distant green, I wonder that even old Ephraim should ever be called upon to make such efforts. But Ephraim has a way with him that makes for success. He is not to be used often, and then when he is he does his job well. That is Ephraim. And do not many of us know the famous golfer who has a dear wooden putter who goes by the name of Fanny? Fanny has done fine duty in championships ere this, and her master knows her every whim and mood. She is a delicate creature is Fanny, and she is not so young as she used to be, and Mr. John, her master, never takes her out in these days when it is wet.

III

Many golfers carry in their minds a fairly clear picture of a club that they regard as their ideal. They have some notion as to its looks, the shape of the head, and the length and the thickness of the shaft. Particularly do they know what that club feels like in their hands as they grip it to make the shot for which it, and it alone, is perfectly adapted. They have never seen such a club, and they fear sometimes that they never will. Some old favourite of theirs has some of the points that are possessed by this ideal, but it has not got them in the same ripe perfection, and it has obvious faults which at times have cost their master dearly. There is no reproachful word to say against that old favourite. It is a good club, and it has done a fine service on the links, and as for its imperfections, are they not what its maker gave to it, trifling imperfections, too, which we are generously disposed to overlook when considering that fine record of service. But it is not the ideal club; it does not feel like that club that we sometimes handle in our imagination, and then enjoy a glorious sense of power as with no other.

It is a pleasant thing to treasure in the mind such a club as this; but let it stop at that. If one grand delusion in which there is nothing harmful, and which on the whole but makes for good, as most ideals do, is not to be destroyed, never set out to reduce that club, now made of but filmy thought, to cold iron or clumsy wood. It will not be the same, be the fancy ever so exact. The first efforts will bring forth results that will be far poorer in quality than those made by old favourites of whom we have spoken, and it will be as if the favourites have jealousy and resent these new-born interlopers, so that they will for the time being cease to give their best work to the man who is so plainly discontented, and who, being so, is lacking in confidence. And the faults that are in those first models that come thus from the mind only increase and aggravate the more as attempts are made to repair them. It is a Will-o’-the-wisp, indeed, is this ideal club, be it driver or brassey or cleek or iron, and it may lure the golfer to a shocking fate. Let us cling to the old favourites and be kind and generous to them. It has been said, and it is no doubt true, that the perfect wife has never yet been born, and some men may reflect upon the advantages of life if they had a perfect wife such as one whom they have painted in their fancy. But in their honesty they will turn their thoughts away from such conceits, and let them dwell upon the manifold excellences of the wives they have, who have hearts that beat, and who, kind and patient and generous, have those human weaknesses which would be faults in the ideal, but which only seem to give to the being the greater human completeness and even perfection. Thus, with this tolerant affection and appreciation, must we look upon our favourite clubs, and leave the ideal to lie unmaterialised and worthless in the mind, a pretty thing to think about, but impossible.

Once there was a man who made a grand effort to materialise the ideal that he had cherished through many seasons. It was a brassey. Some twenty brasseys had he had made, but none of them was quite the thing that he craved. There was something wanting, and thus his shots had not the sting that they ought to have, or that he thought they should possess. But, so often disappointed, he let alone his search for the ideal for a while, and made good friends with one of the real. But he could not forget the ideal brassey, and it grew more and more definite in his imagination. He would look at it there with a smile on his face as he would be going home in the train, and he would handle it and make with it that long carry against the wind that no club of wood and brass in his hands had ever made. Then he took the professional clubmaker into his confidence, and in odd moments after rounds, in the shop they would sometimes talk of this great club, but neither would venture to suggest that it should be made, though they spoke of it as if it were made. They would pick a new one from the stand, and the idealist would say, “Now, Solomon”—he always called it Solomon—“has a shade more hook than that, and there is a little sharper angle to his nose.” The worthy clubmaker entered fully into the spirit of the fancy, and seriously, and he would answer, “Ay, sor, but Sawlaman wasna made by my apprentice!” Another day the golfer would recount the story of his play at a fateful hole, and of the narrow margin by which a fine long shot failed to clear the hazard. It was a moving theme, and after a moment of silence the maker of clubs would say in summary, “Ay, ay, sir; it was a pity ye no had Sawlaman in yer bag!” Yes, it was Solomon that was wanted, just Solomon.

Then one day the player fell to temptation again, and, stirred as of yore by his foolish hopes, he resolved that he would pluck Solomon from the stronghold of his fancy. It was a desperate thing to do, a mad and a reckless thing, a defiance of the spirit world of golf. He told the clubmaker of his resolve, and begged that he would give his closest attention to the details of the commission and his personal care to the execution thereof. The clubmaker, [a] good human man, was afraid. Awe-stricken, he said, “Ye’ll no have ma try to make Sawlaman—a real Sawlaman, sir. I couldna do it! I couldna do it! I canna make a Sawlaman!” But the player had steeled himself to his resolve; and so for days and days old Sandy laboured in his shop, and head after head was shaped and rejected, and stick after stick was shaved and thrown away. It was a weary task. Then the golfer went away for a stay at another links, and a month later he returned, and on passing Sandy’s shop he was beckoned in. “Yes, yes, Sandy! Got him? Got him?” In Sandy’s face there was written a look that was half of disappointment and half of pride. He whispered, “Not Sawlaman, sir, not Sawlaman; he’ll never be seen on the links this life. But I’ve got David, and here he is!” And David, with a black varnished head, most beautifully shaped, a fine greeny hickory shaft scared on, and a feel and a balance when handled, and a lie to the ball that spoke well for power and clean hitting. The golfer fondled the club for a while, for he was pleased with it, but he could see, despite his pleasure, that it was no Solomon and that the great ideal had not been realised, and he knew now that it never could be realised; for while he was conscious that this club was wanting in some of the points that made Solomon so great, his imagination failed him to discover them. It was a grand club, but it killed a great hope; and there was something of sadness in the manner of taking it over. “Never mind, Sandy,” said he. “It was a fine try, a very fine try; and I’ll tell you what we will do. We shall never see Solomon, the real Solomon; but let us have something to remind us of him, and then we will never talk of him, the real one, again. We will call this one, not David, but Solomon. He shall be the Solomon,” and so he is to this day, and in his name he marks the renunciation of that great ideal. And some very fine things he has done, for he is a most worthy club.

IV

The 1st of September is a fine date for the golfer, for it seems to mark for him the beginning of the period of play which is the best of the whole year. The summer heats are cooling, the tints of Nature are turning to beautiful golds and browns and crimsons, and with a little rain the turf begins to yield more to the foot and the club, and play is pleasanter than it was in the dog days. We would have no sorrows to mar the pleasure of such a day; but the golfer need only be braced to skill and worthiness by the reminder that this date has a little black edge round it in his calendar, for on that day there died one who was certainly one of the greatest golfers who ever lived. That was Allan Robertson.

It will always be a difficult matter to compare the golfers of a living generation with those of a dead one, or to estimate the relative quality of the golfers of two different generations, both of them of the long distant past. We have no standards that are carried on from decade to decade and century to century, and while men do not change, their implements do, and the courses on which they play, while, what with the alterations in implements and courses, the methods are much changed, so that it is quite the same game no longer. Therefore it is impossible and futile to make any comparison between the man we have to-day and whom we like to think is the greatest golfer who ever handled a club, and some of the great heroes of the past. That is a question that can never be settled. What we do know, and we can think it for our modern satisfaction, is that there are of necessity many more fine players in these days than ever there were before, and there are dozens for every one that there was in the days of Allan Robertson and young Tom Morris. Therefore it must be much harder to assert supremacy in these days than formerly, and all the greater is the feat of doing it not once, but many times. If some of the old golfers triumphed as often, or nearly, we can say for the men who live in our time, that, in the numerical weight of their conquest at all events, theirs are by far the greater achievements, and they must have that credit.

As in all other matters, it happens that estimates of the merits of things of the past are necessarily indefinite; they vary from time to time. One generation will have it this old-time celebrity was the greatest in his line; while the sons of that generation make hero-worship of another master, and say that he was the best. So it is in golf. One time there will be a feeling that young Tom was incomparably the best of the golfers of the early period of the game. Then by and by a little of this enthusiasm will fade, and it will be agreed that there was no one better than Allan Robertson. Sometimes a wave of feeling will roll over these discussions in favour of good old Tom, and of late years poor Bob Ferguson has been having justice done to the magnificent skill that he displayed when he was in his prime. Now, taking a mental vote from all the authorities one can remember to have spoken or written on these weighty matters, it seems to result in Allan and young Tom coming out at the top. Bob Ferguson is too near our time for his merits to be properly appraised. Our grandchildren may better be able to give his due to the man who won three championships in succession, and tied for a fourth.

But there can be no doubt that Allan was a really great player in every way. Like Bob Ferguson, and like Harry Vardon in our own day, the beauty of his achievement lay largely in the concealment of his effort, and this is the perfection of style. It has been handed down to us as indisputable, that the easiness of his style was its most remarkable feature, and that he never, never seemed to hit hard at the ball. His swing was a long but a gentle one, and his clubs were light. He was the first man to cultivate in its perfection that fine cleek play from long range up to the hole that in our day has been accomplished with such magnificent effect by Vardon. The 79 that he did at St. Andrews in 1858—he was then just turned forty-three years of age, having been born in the year of Waterloo—was then and for a long time later regarded as a most superlative achievement. That time he was out in 40 and home in 39, winding up with a 4 and a 3. That great things could be and were done in those days, even reckoning their merit on the most exacting modern standard, may be realised from the circumstance that, taking the best scores at each hole in all Allan’s rounds on the old course, which he kept, and making up a composite round from them, that round works out to the strange total of 56,—out in 27 and home in 29. In this strong essence of Robertsonian golf the ingredients, in the order of the eighteen, are, 3 3 3 3 4 4 3 1 3 to the turn, and 3 2 3 4 4 3 3 4 3 on the way back.

Allan was a great golfer, and a fine exemplar in every respect, for he was a great-hearted player who never knew when he was beaten, was always cheery and with a smile, and he possessed the very perfection of a golfing temperament, as most, though not all, great players do. That was why everybody found it such a delight to play with him, and why he and old Tom, who had also a fine temperament, were as a foursome pair just as strong and invincible as men could be imagined to be. That lionlike finish of theirs to their historic match with the Dunns deserves all the celebrity it has achieved, and will for ever hold, not so much because it was an exciting thing and a great match, but because it was a triumph of the golf temperament over another that was not quite so good. Allan had the spirit of the game within him; he had the true soul of a golfer, and his most casual utterances constantly indicated how he saw right through to the back side of the game. “It’s aye fechtin’ against ye” was a common observation of his, and there is only too much truth in that simple remark, that the game is hardly ever with you, that it is fighting against you the whole way round. He had no greater admirer than his famous pupil. An “awfu’ good player” was Allan to Tom. “Puir Allan!” soliloquised Tom once, when his old master was no more. “The cunningest bit body o’ a player, I dae think, that iver haun’led cleek an’ putter. An’ a kindly body, tae, as it weel does fit me to say, an’ wi’ a wealth o’ slee pawky fun aboot him.”

“They may toll the bells and shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest is gone,” somebody said when he died. He had golfed all his life from the time when he first knew that he was alive. His father and grandfather were golfers, and the first things that he played with as a child were golf clubs that were made for him.

V

Surely we must account old Tom Morris as one of the wonders of the sporting world, as he is indubitably in that relation to the world of golf. How many times have we heard that the light of that long and happy life was flickering towards its extinction, but the rumour has no sooner been spread than Tom comes forward in some activity to give it full denial. Long may he continue to do so; every time that we hear he is sick upon his bed may a telegram come to us from St. Andrews to say that again he is sitting in the chair outside his shop, watching the couples as they come forward in their turn to hole out on that beloved eighteenth putting green, which, with the clubhouse of the Royal and Ancient beyond it, has during recent times comprised almost the entire circle of his daily vision. Each time I go to St. Andrews I find him still cheery, and indeed it seems to me a little cheerier than the last time that I saw him taking the sun in his chair. There is the cheery respectful greeting and the felicitous remark that it is “a gran’ day for a roond,” and in the next moment he turns his head to mutter a grumble towards those “boys,” who are idling away a few spare minutes outside Forgan’s shop, and are giving evidence of the freshness of the life that is in them, to which Tom, a stickler for decorum in all connected with golf, however humbly or indirectly, demurs. Like most others who are running up the score of their life’s round towards the ninety mark, he is prone to tell you that times have much changed, and that the boys were more sedate in the days when he was one of them. That is as it may be. But despite all the antics of the boys, and the little irritations that they give to old Tom, he remains a cheery Tom to the last, just as he has always been. His life throughout has been imbued with an optimism which has always been the most attractive feature of his character. Every good golfer is an optimist. I deny that it is possible to be a good golfer in the best sense and not be an out-and-out optimist.

Another fine thing about Tom, and one that has always endeared him to the golfing world, is the fact that there has never been anything in the least niggardly in the gratitude which he extends towards the game with which his life has been bound up. Suggest to Tom that there is anything better in life than golf, and you have done the first thing towards raising up a barrier of reserve between him and you. Listen to how he spoke of the game of his heart on a New Year’s Day twenty-one years back from now, when even then he was by way of becoming an old man. “An’ it hadna been for gowff,” he said to the patron who greeted him in the customary form for the first day of the year, “I’m no sure that at this day, sir, I wad hae been a leevin’ man. I’ve had ma troubles an’ ma trials, like the lave; an’ whiles I thocht they wad hae clean wauved me, sae that to ‘lay me doun an’ dee’—as the song says—lookit about a’ that was left in life for puir Tam. It was like as if ma vera sowle was a’thegither gane oot o’ me. But there’s naething like a ticht gude gowing mautch to soop yer brain clear o’ that kin’ o’ thing; and wi’ the help o’ ma God an’ o’ gowff, I’ve aye gotten warsled through somehow or ither. The tae thing ta’en wi’ the tither, I haena had an ill time o’t. I dinna mind that iver I had an unpleasant word frae ony o’ the many gentlemen I’ve played wi’. I’ve aye tried—as ma business was, sir—to mak’ masel’ pleesant to them; an’ they’ve aye been awfu’ pleesant to me. An’ noo, sir, to end a long and maybe a silly crack—bein’ maistly about masel’—ye’ll just come wi’ me, an’ ye’ll hae a glass o’ gude brandy, and I’ll have ma pint o’ black strap, an’ we’ll drink a gude New Year to ane anither, an’ the like to a’ gude gowffers.”

Sportsman, in the best sense, Tom has always been, and he was a worthy predecessor of the men who are to-day at the head of the ranks of the professional golfers. That is a pretty story that is told of Captain Broughton’s challenge to Tom to hole a putt for £50. As everybody knows, Tom was once famous as the man who missed the very shortest putts, to whom there was duly delivered, when he was at Prestwick, a letter which was addressed only to the “Misser of Short Putts, Prestwick.” On the occasion under notice Tom was playing to the High Hole on the old course at St. Andrews, and had got into sore trouble, so that he was playing two or three more when Captain Broughton happened to pass by and became a witness of what was happening. Tom, be it noted, always belonged to golfers of that fine and sportmanlike persistency, who would never give up a hole while there was a single spark of hope remaining alight. “Oh, pick up your ball, Tom, it’s no use!” said the Captain half chidingly. “Na, na,” answered Tom, “I might hole it!” “If you do I’ll give you £50,” retorted the Captain, and it seemed a very safe retort too. “Done!” responded Tom, and thereupon made one more stroke with his iron club, and lo! the ball hopped on to the green, and glided on and on towards the hole, hesitated as it came nearer to it, curled round towards it, crept nearer and nearer until it was on the lip—and down! He had holed! Then said the triumphant Tom, “That will make a nice little nest-egg for me to put in the bank,” and the Captain looked very serious and went his way. A few days later the Captain came along with the £50, and with a smile and a compliment offered it to Tom as the fruits of his achievement; but Tom declined absolutely to take a penny of it. “I thank ye, Captain, and I’m grateful to ye all the same; but I canna tak’ the money, because, ye see, ye wisna really meaning it, and it wisna a real wager.” And to that he stuck.

VI

There are alarms and excursions in the ball business daily, and the player takes a devoted interest in them all. The trade is striving with might and main to put ten yards on to the drive of little Tomkins, and poor old grandfather, who began his golf at sixty, may think as he goes off to sleep at night that perhaps by the morning there will be a new ball on the market which will enable him to get his handicap down to 20. The good inventors are doing all that they can for him. They are trying everything and each thing in all possible different ways. The other day a great professional was taking stock of his shop, and he found that he had twenty-seven different varieties of rubber-cored balls in hand. And many golfers feel that they must try them all and each new one as it comes out. The evolution of the golf ball is one of the most wonderful things of its kind. All of us who have played golf for more than five years can plume ourselves on the fact that we lived in golf in the earlier era of the gutta; it is strange to think that possibly half of the present golfing population cannot say that, so quickly has the game been coming on of late. But not one golfer in five thousand of those living now played in the days of the feather-stuffed ball, which was the pioneer. It had the game to itself up to 1848, which was the year that the gutta came in. St. Andrews was the great centre of manufacture of the “featheries,” and in the shop of Allan Robertson alone there were some three thousand a year made. Of course three thousand rubber-cores would be nothing in these days, but making a ball was a big job then, and they were expensive, costing about four shillings each. And a single topped shot with an iron finished them absolutely! The ballmakers bought the little leather cases ready made from the St. Andrews saddlers, a small hole being left to stuff the feathers in. The feathers were boiled, and it took a large hatful to stuff a ball tight with them. Mr. Campbell of Saddell is believed to have taken the first gutta balls to St. Andrews, and when he did so there was consternation everywhere. They thought the trade in the featheries would be ruined, and that anyone could make the new balls. So an attempt was made to boycott them, and it is even said that Allan Robertson bought up all the lost balls that were found in the whins and destroyed them by fire! Tom Morris was working in his shop then, and they quarrelled so violently the first day when Tom used a gutta that they parted for ever. Tom himself tells the story in this way: “I can remember the circumstances well. Allan could not reconcile himself at first to the new ball at all, just in the same way as Mr. John Low and many other golfers could not take to the Haskell when it first appeared. But the gutta became the fashion very quickly, as the rubber-cored ball has done, so what could we do? One day, and it is one that will always be clearly stamped on my memory, I had been out playing golf with a Mr. Campbell of Saddell, and I had the misfortune to lose all my supply of balls, which were, you can well understand, very much easier lost in those days, as the fairway of the course was ever so much narrower then than it is now, and had thick, bushy whins close in at the side. But never mind that. I had, as I said, run short of balls, and Mr. Campbell kindly gave me a gutta one to try. I took to it at once, and as we were playing in, it so happened that we met Allan Robertson coming out, and someone told him that I was playing a very good game with one of the new gutta balls, and I could see fine, from the expression of his face, that he did not like it at all, and when we met afterwards in his shop, we had some high words about the matter, and there and then we parted company, I leaving his employment. There are two big bushes out there in Allan’s old garden. Well, one of them was planted by him and the other by me, just about that same time, so they cannot be young bushes now.” But by 1850 the guttas were in general use and nobody was much the worse.

It is odd to reflect that golfers were very near the rubber core several times during the fifty-four years that the gutta held office. As we were told in the big law case, an old lady made balls that were wound with rubber thread to make them bounce more; but, nearer to our rubber-core, there were two golfers who at different times and places are said to have made what was to all intents and purposes just the same ball in principle that we use to-day, but not so thoroughly made and perfected. One of these golfers used to make them and give them to his friends. But there was no advertising and not so much enterprise in the way of companies with big capital in those days, and these inventors let their chance go by. What a chance! There were millions, and millions again, in their idea.

None the less the Americans deserve the credit for being the men who gave us the rubber-cored ball as we know it. But for their belief in it, and their enterprise, there would have been no rubber-cores to-day, and perhaps far fewer golfers. Let me tell the real story of how they came by their idea and their determination. In the early summer of 1898, Mr. Coburn Haskell was the guest of Mr. Wirk, one of the magnates of the American rubber industry, at his house in Cleveland, Ohio, and both being golfers, they golfed all day and talked golf during dinner and afterwards. It was these dinner conversations that brought about the Haskell ball, revolutionised the game, and made an industry which is the most thriving of all connected with sport. Both gentlemen agreed that they wanted a better ball than the gutta, something that would go farther. At last, after many sittings, one of them observed that something might be done by winding rubber under tension. Winding it without such tension would result in the ball being too soft. This idea was elaborated during the next night or two, and then Mr. Wirk hurried away to his factory, obtained some rubber strands, and he and Mr. Haskell spent nearly a day in winding, by their own hands and in secret, the first ball of the new era. They covered it with gutta-percha and gave it to a professional to try, without informing him of the nature of what he was trying. They watched anxiously for the result, and with the very first shot that the man had with it he carried a bunker that had never been carried before, beating the best drive that had ever been made on that course by many yards. Then the two makers smiled happily at each other. They knew that they were “on a good thing.” It took more than two years to invent a machine to do the winding, and some time longer to perfect the process. Then the Haskell killed the gutta in a season. Before that Britain supplied America with all her balls. Afterwards she sent none; but the makers of the Haskell bought 30,000 dozen that had been sent over, for the sake of the gutta-percha of which they were made, and at the bare price of that material.

In the first five months of 1903 the American people shipped 40,000 dozen of their balls to this country. So were the tables turned. Now they ship very few indeed, as we make our balls ourselves. Instead, they are threatening American golfers as to what will happen if they catch them playing on American courses with British balls. Of the little ball that was thought out over the dinner table in Ohio on those hot summer evenings there are now half a million used in a week in the busy season on British courses, and some fifteen millions, at a cost of about a million pounds, in the course of the season!

But yet not one man in a thousand who looks upon his beautiful white rubber core when it is new knows what and how much is inside it. In one ball there are 192 yards of thread, the whole of which is stretched to eight times its original length, so that, as it is in the ball, there are 1536 yards of it—nearly a mile. This thread has to be wound round something. It has commonly been wound round a tiny piece of wood; now, in the case of some balls, it is being wound round little bags of gelatine and things like that. Some people are under the delusion that in the case of such balls the whole centre is gelatine, and that there is no rubber.

VII

The man who has the courage to enter upon a medal round or a match with a keen opponent and play with a cheap, or cheaper, ball, is a rarity, and an admirable one. Faith goes for a long way in these matters. Give a man the most expensive ball on the market to play with, and he feels that he has got something which will do justice to his capabilities, and occasionally let him off with light penalties for some of his errors. Let him have a cheap ball and he is uneasy, with the idea that nothing is likely to go right for him. When he has faith in his ball—his expensive ball—he plays accordingly, that is to say, he plays with confidence, and the probabilities are, of course, that in such case he will play better than he would otherwise do, especially if he makes a good start. If he has not so much faith in his ball—because it is cheap—he will not play so well, because he will play without confidence. This is really a truism which is emphasised over and over again on the links every day. As this player cannot test his balls accurately and show for a certainty which one is better than others, he has naturally faith in the more expensive, because it ought to be better, whether it is or not. So one comes quite logically to the conclusion that the most expensive balls are the best. Now suppose that the makers of any of our leading brands of florin balls were at this stage to reduce the price of their specialities to a shilling each. What would be the attitude of these golfers to that ball? They would say to themselves, or suspect, that these makers were taking something out of the quality of their wares, and if they suspected that, they would almost certainly find innumerable happenings in their next match, which in their opinion would give the utmost possible support to their theory. Every drive that fell short of the proper standard would be put down to the makers of the ball; this really very funny golfer would shake his head and say that it was a great pity, and so forth, but that he would have to give up this shilling ball, of which at two shillings he was so very fond. And he would do it. But all the time there may not be a particle of difference between the old two-shilling ball and the new shilling one.

Once again one is tempted to the fancy that there is a good future for a reasonably good ball to be sold at five shillings. It would not be a popular ball, because there is a large proportion of players to whom this one would at last be too expensive; but all who could afford to play with it by making some little sacrifice, such as by cycling to the links instead of going by train, by carrying their own clubs two or three times a week instead of employing a caddie, or, simpler still, by reducing the weekly or monthly allowance for domestic purposes to the lady of the household because of the hard times, would certainly do so. And as the rich golfers would play with it also, it would have a good sale, and if it cost no more to make than the florin balls it would be very profitable to the manufacturers. All the ordinary golfers would play well with it. They would feel that they had the very best, that at last they could do themselves justice. They would have confidence. Queer world this of golf!

VIII

“The course is black with parsons,” was said one fine Monday at the outset of his game by a man who had been kept waiting for a most unconscionable time while a minor canon and a plain vicar had been worrying away in bunkers on opposite sides of the first short hole. In this observation there was some evident exaggeration, but it is being borne in upon us every day how more and more popular is this diversion becoming with the cloth, as indeed it should and might be expected to be, since golf makes its greatest appeal to those of the most thoughtful and philosophical temperaments, such as clergymen should possess. Excellent is this association, and it is a poor and threadbare humour that is constantly fancying the cleric in such exasperation with his game that ordinary modes of expression are insufficient for him. Having heard of the worthy divine who was horribly bunkered and in a heel-mark at the Redan at North Berwick, to whom the most excellent of caddies, “big” Crawford observed, “Noo, gin an aith wad relieve ye, dinna mind me”; and of the other one who was reported as repeating the Athanasian Creed at the bottom of “Hell”—the bunker of that name on the St. Andrews course—one would wish to go no farther with such stories. The celebrated Bishop Potter of New York was playing golf on the course at Saranac, and he made a mighty attempted drive that topped the ball, and another one that tore up the turf, and yet a third that almost missed the ball, and each time he uttered a soothing “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh!” But the caddie was himself a golfer of a very stern and human school, and in his great annoyance he exclaimed, “Man alive! sh-sh-sh-sh won’t send that ball where you want it to go to!” The Rev. Silvester Horne, who is one of the keenest of the clerical golfers, and has been known to captain a side of parsons occasionally, once drew up a system of conduct to be observed by brother clergymen when playing the game, and a very excellent system it was, with severe adjurations against the doing of many things such as are common with the ordinary golfer, and certain small licences permitted to make the path a trifle less difficult than it might otherwise be.

There was a worthy rector who was given to golf, and was somewhat sensitive upon the subject of the large scores that were made by his foozling. He had a pretty way; he did not count his score himself, though who knows what subconscious ideas he may or may not have formed as to its dimensions? But be that as it may, he would say to his caddie as at last he flopped the ball on to the green at the short hole, “Now, my boy, how many have I played this time?” The caddie, being official counter to the rector, would say at once, “Six, sir!” Then the reverend gentleman would stop suddenly in his march forwards, and would turn upon this miserable little boy with a severe and awful frown, and would say, or almost shriek, “Six! six! six! Whatever are you saying, my boy? Have you been watching the game? Do you really mean six?” The caddie was utterly cowed. “N—n—no, sir,” he would stammer, “I’m very sorry; I m—m—mean five!” “Ha! That is better,” his reverence smiled. “Yes, no doubt it is five; five, certainly. Let it be five. But”—and this very seriously—“my boy, it is of the greatest importance to count the strokes correctly at this game, and let this be a warning to you. Take great care with the counting.” And yet it was six.

But, tell us, why is it that the clergyman, with all his magnificent opportunities, is so seldom anything like a good player, so often has a handicap deep down in the teens? You may see him on the links six days a week, and yet he goes on from year to year no nearer to the degree of scratch, still driving his short and very wayward ball with that nervous, fearful stance of his, that slow, hesitating swing. I can almost tell the clergyman on the tee, however he may be disguised, he is such a doubter. Yet, with his opportunities, the Church ought to be by way of finding a candidate for the championship. Can it be that the philosophical temperament in excess kills keenness and makes a man content in his own little kingdom of foozling and shortness—

“Contented if he might enjoy
The things that others understand.”

There can be no other explanation. But it is to be set down perhaps to the clergyman’s credit that he is so often unorthodox in his methods. On the links he is the broadest-minded man alive, and he is tolerant of all things. Why, if ever in London one wants to be reminded of just the way in which the Barry swing is done, one might seek out none other than the Bishop of London, for if ever a man performs that fall-back, bent-kneed swipe it is Dr. Ingram, as photographs will prove. If this is to be, then an archbishop might play no stymies, and how then shall a curate become a champion?

IX

We have not that form and ceremony in the management of our golf clubs that our ancestors had, nor is there so much idea and sentiment employed. Golf in these days seems often to be regarded too much as a work-a-day affair, so that at few places besides St. Andrews is there any real preservation of the old feeling. Else, the true spirit dominating, why should there not still be chaplains to all the old-established golf clubs? How much the chaplain counted for in the great golfing days of old may be gathered from the minute of the Honourable Company which they made when settling an appointment to the office. The club then had its home at Leith, the date being 1764, and it was entered in the book—“The Captain and Council, taking into their serious consideration the deplorable situation of the Company in wanting a godly and pious Chaplain, they did intreat the Reverend Doctor John Dun, Chaplain to the Right Honourable the Earl of Galloway, to accept the office of being Chaplain to the Golfers; which desire the said Doctor, out of his great regard to the Glory of God and the good of the Souls of the said Company, was Religiously pleased to comply with. Therefore the Company and Council Did and Do hereby nominate, present, and appoint the said Rev. Doctor John Dun to be their Chaplain accordingly. The said Reverend Doctor did accept of the Chaplaincy, and in token thereof said Grace after dinner.” Whether the general company of golfers is at present in as “deplorable situation” as the Honourable Company was at this time, is a nice point which need not be inquired into.

X

In a day when the young school of golfers is making such a determined advance it is often difficult to make distinctions of merit and to determine who are the most promising and who will most probably become the really great golfers of the future. We are a little too much inclined to get into the way of saying that this man is likely to be an amateur champion of the future, and that that player is almost a certainty for the high honours of the game. When people talk in this irresponsible fashion they forget several things—that competition now is many times keener than it was in the days when the Balls and the Taits and the Hiltons first became champions, and when it was quite safe to prophesy beforehand that they would be, and that in the future it will be keener still; that there is more luck than ever in the game and in the selection of champions, and that if the honour is to be denied to such a fine player as Mr. John Graham, who has forgotten more about the game than some of the younger school know, nobody should say that others are likely to be champions; and that because a man does some fine golf for a week or two it does not follow that he is a fine golfer.

The game no doubt is easier now than it used to be, and it is more difficult for fine distinctions in merit between players to be reproduced in the balance of holes; but still in the long run knowledge and skill will tell, and those men of the younger school who are deeply thoughtful and scientific golfers will in the end separate themselves from those of their rivals whose methods are more of the slapdash order. With all the advance of the young school, and its scores of men with high plus handicaps, each of whom is declared to be good enough to win the championship if it finds him on his day, one would seriously hesitate to suggest that there are more than five or six young players at the present time who show any promise at all of becoming as good golfers as Ball and Hilton and Laidlay have been. The remainder may be only the veriest trifle their inferiors, and the difference may be so small that it may constantly be not indicated in the results of competitions, or it may even show a balance to the credit of the players whom we are regarding as the inferior ones. But in the long run the minority, who know more about the game, will triumph, and will be separated from the general ruck. With all the talk that there has been about the levelling up of the players as the result of the rubber-cored ball, depend upon it that in twenty years from now we shall still have a high table in golf, at which will sit the acknowledged masters of the game, just as some of those whose names we have mentioned have sat at this table for the past decade or two.

XI

Perhaps it would be as well for the golf of some of us if now and again a time of quiet and inactive thought were enforced. It is certain that many men feel much the better in their game for having been deprived of play for a time, greatly irritated as they have been. The fact is that he who is a faithful golfer often plays it mentally when real shots on the links are denied to him. It turns out that this mental golf is of a very thorough order; never is the player so analytical and severely critical of his methods as then, and never does he grope more patiently or more intelligently for the hidden light that is the source of success. It is simple fact that men have discovered grave faults in their play in this way, such as they never suspected during the whole season that they had been committing them in real play on the links. And in the same way others have come upon great secrets of fine details of method, making for the improvement of their game, which they would never have encountered at golf on a course.

The chief, if not the only reason, and one that is quite good enough to be convincing, for this somewhat peculiar state of affairs is, that this is essentially practice and experimental golf, in which the player is constantly wondering and trying something new; while the golf that he plays with clubs and balls on the green grass is far too often exclusively match-play or score-play golf, and that is regarded at the time as too responsible a thing to permit of any experiment. The old ways may be bad ways, and no doubt many of them are; but we must stand by them on occasions of this kind, we say to ourselves, when the wise precept of an old player-friend flashes across our mind, the opponent being one up with three to go, and a very vindictive fellow. It is evident, then, that we do too much of this match and score play, and that the consequence is that we are never given time and the opportunity for thought and practice and the working out of experiments and ideas that might prove of the utmost moment. Our game runs along a little old-constructed channel, and it gets clogged with fault. When we go out to golf for the day, no other possibility presents itself to our minds than that of the two rounds, one before luncheon, and the other one after, with living opponent or opponents, and always upon such occasions we must trust to the old ways to pull us through. How much would it make for future improvement if one of the rounds, or a long afternoon, were devoted to simple lonely practice with one club, or at most two, in which new ideas might be tried, theories considered, and different and perhaps more effective ways to salvation worked out. Spend an hour thus in close communion with one’s cleek or iron, and what an intimacy is established that never would have been otherwise! There used to be suspicion, distrustfulness, fear, and neglect—and what may follow upon such relations save utter failure?—but now there is friendship, and an appreciation of capabilities and qualities that bodes ill for the arrogance of the opponent who has seen so many failures with this cleek or iron, that he has come to think that when it is unbagged it is time for him to be adding one more hole to his score. The man who never does any of this practice golf never gives himself a chance of learning how to play more than one stroke with one club, and when there is only one stroke to a club it is not generally a very good or very reliable stroke, as can easily be shown.

Thinking thus, we perceive the value of influenza and the minor illnesses, and come to realise the truth of the remark by one earnest golfer, that the thing that of all others had most improved his game of golf was a severe attack of typhoid fever, which all but summarily terminated his career. When this man told us that he emerged from that disquieting experience a new and better golfer, and one more thorough, the observation seemed cryptic to the point of absurdity, and it was not taken very seriously. But it is certainly true that a very earnest golfer will think long and hard upon all points of his game during a dull period of enforced rest and idleness such as comes at sickness, and then all the sins of omission and commission loom up in his troubled mind, and he corrects the faults that he knows now, as probably he would not admit before, went to the undoing of his game. The entire position is revised; in the early days of convalescence we send downstairs to the study for some favourite volumes, and we look up Vardon, Braid, or Taylor on a subtle point of which we have been making mental examination. The thoughtful studies of Mr. John Low are a stimulant at such times. Such introspection is a fine thing and most fruitful, and little wonder after all that the player does indeed return to health a wiser and a more complete golfer, who will now go farther in skill upon the links than ever he would have done in the old, narrow, careless days.

What follows is a story that bears somewhat upon the moral that we have been thinking over. There was a man who was in want of a shot that would come between the driving iron and the wood, and he could not find one. Of the cleek he had no good word to say; he could not play it. Of driving mashies he had several, and some of them were well enough at times, and at others they were like the cleek, so that what with his driving mashies and his cleeks, this man was in constant jeopardy when there was a shot of a hundred and sixty or seventy yards to play, and so he was unhappy in his game. It happened that one of his driving mashies was one that had been gifted to him upon a day by a great player, who said, “I pick this from all that I have seen; may I never play more if it is not a perfect club!” The man tried it, and it seemed to him that the head wanted more ballast, and after a little while he allowed the club to be gathered to his fine collection of idle relics, saying to himself consolingly, “What suits one man does not suit another.” Thus it came to pass that the perfect club that a champion player declared he would love to play a long-short hole with to save the life of himself or his dearest friend, lay for months and years in a dark cupboard.

In the even cycle of this golfer’s life the time of torment came round once again, and, as it had seemed before, it was more desperate than it had ever been. There appeared to be no remedy. All the tricks had been tried, and all the clubs generally put into commission had been experimented with, and there was no good result. And then a strange thing happened. Things were at about their worst, when, as sometimes was the case, this poor tormented golfer awoke in his bed very early one morning in summer. The sun had not long broken the darkness; it was about three o’clock. Being a man who went to bed betimes and who was early refreshed, he did this time, as on others, lie in long thought upon the events of life and his own affairs, the perfect stillness of the time conducing to effective contemplation. And, as was inevitable, the chain of reflection brought him round to the prevailing worry of the game, and for half an hour or so he considered this grave problem from every conceivable point of view, and subjected each iron instrument that was concerned with it to the severest cross-examination, from which none emerged with an unspotted reputation. It is not always in the human golfer to attach entire blame to flesh and blood, and wholly exonerate inanimate iron. Pride must have its place, even in the times of adversity. This man was self-assured that one reason for his failure—not the whole reason, perhaps; but still one reason—was that all his searchings and purchasings had yet left him without the club that he really needed, that one which was resting somewhere in a shop or in another man’s bag, that was the affinity of his game, the thing that was meant for him and which one day might come his way. He had a vague instinct of what the feel of that club would be like, of the shape of its head, its balance, and the length of the shaft. When he encountered it he would know it at once for the long-sought-for club.

Then, as by a gift of the gods, an idea flashed through his mind and caused him to start up, thoroughly roused from the dreamy state of lethargy. That club! That old despised club that had come to him from the champion with such a glowing recommendation, wasted entirely! That was the club that was wanted; it must have been one of the most irresponsible and illogical moments of his golfing lifetime when it was rejected. Did it not conform to that ideal that was vaguely felt in the mind? As he handled it in imagination now, did it not seem quite perfect, that above all other clubs its true motto was “Far and sure.” When a golfer makes discoveries of this kind about his old clubs, that, poor things, cannot speak for themselves and tell him what he is doing wrong, he is man enough to own his previous mistakes, and this player owned them. He was all contrition, repentance, humility. He wished to abase himself before the champion club and promote it to the captaincy of his bag. Therefore when there is no sound to be heard save the chirruping of the birds and the creaking of stairs, see this inspired golfer leave his room, clad in a dressing-gown, at half-past three in the morning, and go forward to the ransacking of a rubbish cupboard in search for the wanted club. And there it was found at last, a little rusty, the marks of privation from golf and of severe neglect written plainly upon its face, but sure enough that same grand club that had lived in the remembrance until at last it was appreciated. Yes, it was just as it had been imagined to be. It was the perfect club; it would do what all others had failed to do. Happy club in which there is placed such belief and confidence, for the less likely is it ever to disappoint! In his mood of repentance the man gets a little emery and brightens up the blade until the first shafts of the morning sunlight glint upon it. Being a handy man with a tool or two, he takes out the tack at the end of the grip and unwinds it, laying it back again in some way to suit the fancy of the time. And then the grip is waxed, and the club is ready, and it is laid to a ball on the hearth-rug, and how that ball could be hit, with a fine, low, skimming flight that would yield much length, and the stroke, having been something of a push, would dump the ball at the end of it just down beside the flag! It is no use. Let it be four o’clock or twelve, why should the conventions keep us off the links when these exalted moods are upon us? The golfer hurries through a bath, puts his clothes about him, and with the whole world of golf save this one unit still asleep, even unto the most watchful greenkeeper, he hurries down to the course with a few balls and just this one club, this one fine club. And there the truth of it all is realised. It is the club that was wanted, and the shots that come from it are just as perfect as shots by this man will ever be. The balls are fired off up to the first green one by one, and it is found then that such are the virtues of this club of exquisite balance that it is a splendid thing to putt with!

It is a glorious morning. The pearly sky seems to speak well of weather prospects for the day when it opens out, and there is not wind enough to curl a wavelet on the sea, which simply makes a little soothing creamy lapping on the pebbles. How grand is the fine expanse of the course in this morning freshness, and is there not something of rugged beauty in that huge sandy projection which marks the short hole far out? This indeed is the time of day for the golfer to be abroad. Happy man who is in this mood, having found that which was lost. The golfing life is not the same. A little thought and much confidence, and see to what they will carry you! Make the most of them, you happy fellow, for they may not last—they may not last!

[THE QUEER SIDE]

I

Probably it is true that golf carries its votaries farther in enthusiasm than does any other game or sport. It is characteristic of the golfing enthusiasm that it does but increase as time goes on, and that not in the case of one man in twenty does it show any diminution, while the game is such a jealous mistress that it is rarely the convert to golf maintains any regular association with other sports unless he is of such complete leisure that it is impossible for golf alone to fill up his hours. Practically every golfer, therefore, is a keen enthusiast, and though we dislike to hear the phrase come from the lips of those who are not of us, we have to confess that there is some justification for the extremity of this enthusiasm being described as “golf fever”; for indeed at times it provokes the player to the doing of many things which in the cold light of reason afterwards would not be regarded as completely rational. We are all enthusiasts; but who was the greatest enthusiast who ever was? An impossible question to answer, of course, if for no other reason than that the limit appears to have been reached by hundreds; but tradition can always settle matters of this kind in its own way, and it has determined for us who was the keenest golfer, and has seen to it, moreover, that his memory shall be safely perpetuated. Thus we have old Alexander MʻKellar as the patron saint of the man who likes to get his three and four rounds a day in the summer-time, and is miserable unless he has a club in his hand in his resting hours.

It is something to have become regarded as the keenest golfer, for it goes without saying that every other worldly consideration of every description whatsoever must have been sacrificed to the attainment of that vast distinction. Such a man must have really earned the title of “Cock o’ the Green,” which was given to MʻKellar, and with that title his fame will be handed down through the generations as it is affixed to an historic print. This picture of the old worthy, who indeed was fairly “mad” on the game, was first circulated more than a hundred years ago, and has become one of our most cherished golfing antiquities. His enthusiasm brimmed over when in the act of play, and “By the la’ Harry, this shall not go for nothing!” as he used to say involuntarily when addressing the ball, became something of a catch-phrase in his district. He did his golf from Edinburgh, and Bruntsfield Links was his playing ground. How often does one find that they are the keenest golfers who do not take up the game in their youth? It may be true that generally the man who does not swing a club as a child has not such a good chance of becoming a player with pretensions to championship form as have those who made such early acquaintance with the game; but do we not find that these men become the fondest and most thorough players, making up in enthusiasm and real enjoyment what they lack in skill? Thus there is a grand compensation after all, and let us weep no more for the golf that we missed in our schooldays; for some of those who played it then are they who now find their greatest ease of heart for some weeks of the year at fishing, shooting, or some other sport in which something has to be killed.

And so the “Cock o’ the Green” did not begin his golf at all until he was quite a middle-aged man, and all likelihood of his ever becoming a really finished player had completely vanished. And he was of comparatively humble means. He had saved a little money, such as went for some justification for his constant idleness; but his wife found it necessary to keep a tavern in Edinburgh when they went to live there. MʻKellar gave no hand in the management of this tavern; he had no time for anything but golf, and bitter were the upbraidings that he had to endure from his worthy and industrious dame as a consequence. Mrs. MʻKellar may indeed be set down as the first that we know anything about of that long line of sufferers who go by the name of golf-widows. This lady might have borne her isolation better if it had not been the fact that she was somewhat mocked for it, and found the name of her lord a byword in every neighbour’s house and at every street corner for his over-indulgence in the game of golf, fair “cracked” on it, as everybody took him to be. She tried to shame him once, but had much the worse of the experiment. She thought to make him a butt for the laughter of his companions by taking to the links one day his dinner and his nightcap. But when she arrived there he was in the throes of a hard-fought match, and when she offered him the meal he answered her kindly, but with some touch of impatience, that she might wait if she chose until the game was completed, when he would attend to her, but that for the time being he had no leisure for dinner. And the game went on. So she came to loathe the very name of golf, and was scarcely civil to the tavern customers who were players and friends of her good man. But one day she had a sweet revenge upon him. She set out for a journey to Fife, and was expected to be away for at least a day. No sooner was her back turned than hospitable MʻKellar went forth to bid his golfing friends to his house, which, when its lady was in residence, they might in no wise enter. A fine feast was prepared, and the party was a merry one, when the door opened, and there stood, with a countenance drawn with suppressed wrath, Mrs. MʻKellar, who had been obliged to return, through the ferry being impassable as a consequence of the severe weather that prevailed.

Every morning the “Cock o’ the Green” hurried through his breakfast, and away he went to Bruntsfield Links with all the haste possible, never returning home again until night had fallen. Sometimes, indeed, he did not come then, if there were any good golfing excuse for not doing so. Many were the times when he was discovered playing at the short holes by the dim glimmer of a lamp, and a moonlight night was an almost irresistible temptation to him. Heat and cold did not diminish his ardour; and in the winter, when the snow covered the course, he would do his utmost to persuade an opponent to share a round with him; and if he failed he would go out alone and wander the whole way round playing his ball from flag to flag, the greens and holes not being discoverable. Like all keen golfers he loved the foursome, and preferred to be tested by it if he could find a partner of any quality whatever. One day he was in Leith and fell in conversation with some strangers there, glass-blowers they were, and, as always, the subject turned upon the game, and from the game in general to the prowess of the “Cock o’ the Green” in particular. The men of Leith affected to think little of his play, and challenged him to a match, upon which moment a Bruntsfield youngster made his appearance. “By gracious, gentlemen!” exclaimed MʻKellar, “here is a boy, and we will play you for a guinea!” The match took place, and victory lay with MʻKellar, who was so excited when the last hole had been played that he ran post haste to the shop of the clubmaker, screaming, “By gracious, gentlemen, the old man and the boy have beat them off the green!”

The artist Kay, who made the picture of him, went out on to the links one day to draw it from the life unbeknown to the hero, and when he came to know about it afterwards he was sorely disappointed that he had not been given the opportunity of posing. “What a pity!” he lamented. “By gracious! If I had but known I would have shown him some of my capers!” Perhaps it was as well he did not. When he won his match he would sometimes be so mad with joy that he would dance round the hole for a minute. Such delight was pure, for though he did wager a little on his matches he did not risk more than he could well afford to lose, and it was the game he tried to win and not the little that he bet. On Sundays, when there was no golf to be played, he fulfilled the duties of doorkeeper to an Episcopalian church, and held the plate. Douglas Gourlay, the famous ballmaker, one day put a ball into the plate by way of joke, guessing what would happen. He was right, MʻKellar’s golfing cupidity was too much for him. His eyes glistened, and in an instant the ball was transferred to his pocket. Poor old MʻKellar! Weak enough he may have been, but he did love his game as absolutely nothing else in life, which for him ended nearly a century since.

II

It is an ancient game; but let no man think yet that we have realised a fair part of the curious situations that may arise on the links when the golfer hits a ball, or that we have a full appreciation of the possibilities of their complexity. Very quaint are some of the difficulties that twice a year are presented to the Rules of Golf Committee sitting at St. Andrews for the special purpose of discovering solutions thereto.

From far Manawatu once there came a plaintive cry for help. These New Zealand golfers confessed that in all the holes on their greens there is an iron box with a small flag on the top to mark the holes. In an inter-club match the caddie of one of the players before leaving the green, when replacing the box, put it into the hole, flag downwards, exposing a sharp point on the top. One of the next two players, when approaching to that hole, landed his ball on the top of the box in the hole, and it remained there. Then the arguments began, and not until a letter had sailed the seas from the Antipodes, and the Royal and Ancient Club had sent her answer back to this outpost of her empire of golf, did they subside. The man who had executed this wonderful shot had held that he could reverse the box and put it into its proper position and claim the hole. It hurt St. Andrews to think that away there in New Zealand, left to their own resources, they should give themselves up to such queer-fangled contrivances as hole flags with boxes on them. If a bit of cloth and a stick of sorts is good enough for the old course, why should Manawatu want what these Royal and Ancients sarcastically referred to as “mechanical contrivances”? The high authority begged leave to observe that the Rules of Golf did not provide for such “mechanical contrivances,” and the New Zealanders were recommended to make local rules to suit them.

You may always tell from the form of the answer when the St. Andrews lip has curled at the question that has been asked of it. Nowadays the committee can hear the mention of a hedge without a rise in its temperature; but when the secretary, in reading out the problem of the moment, has to say “mud” there is uneasiness still. The committee move in their chairs, they fidget, they scowl, somebody mutters “Tut, tut!” and they all cough to hide their agitation. “Mud” is the word you must not say. I have not seen the committee in this agitation; nobody except its own members has, for it is a very private committee; but this sudden disturbance can be imagined most clearly. Yet these inconsiderate golfers will keep on mentioning mud, and St. Andrews answers them back with as much asperity as is consistent with the preservation of its own dignity. One time in a matter of this kind they gave a snubbing to a Kentish course. The club there, in all seriousness and innocence, propounded a very pretty point. “Playing in a foursome,” they said, “A is left by his partner’s approach shot a six-inch putt for the hole; but A’s ball pitched in a small piece of wet mud left on the edge of the green (presumably from the boot of a player in front). A small piece of this mud clung to the ball, and was on the side of the ball A had to strike. A played the stroke, and the ball and the mud stuck to his putter, and the head of the putter and the ball on it were exactly above the hole.” This was surely a most delightful situation! See how pretty is the combination of this foursome pair, and how they do play each the game to suit the other, thus: “His partner then with his putter tapped the ball off A’s putter and it fell into the hole.” A charming incident! “Did A or his partner lose or halve the hole, and would A have been within his rights in shaking the ball off into the hole, or what should they have done?” Said the Committee to the secretary, “Tell these good people that the Committee have no experience of such tenacious mud, and such a contingency should be provided for by the local rules,” and then they hurriedly spoke of the weather and the wind and the state of the eighteenth green, and how the Major got a bonny 3 there the night before—anything to get this taste of Kentish mud out of their St. Andrews mouths.

A point of some curious interest was that which arose in the course of medal play on the course of the Higher Bebington Club some time ago. A player had one of those most tantalising putts a yard in length to play, and, like many a man before him, he missed it! In his aggravation at the circumstance he snatched back his ball, and, without having holed it out, he replaced it where it was before, in order to try his putt over again, to satisfy his amour propre that the holing of such a putt was not beyond his mortal capacity. This is an old way of attempting to gain some small crumb of satisfaction from a very disappointing business. At the second attempt he holed that putt, but his partner then told him that he was obliged to disqualify him from the entire competition for not having holed out when making his putt. The competitor agreed that he had done wrong, and accepted this fate; but some time later, when he had fully thought over the business, and read up the rules, he protested. Yet his committee maintained that he really should be disqualified, and after much argument the seers of the Royal and Ancient were begged to give their decision. And it was a very interesting decision. The high court held that Rule 10 of stroke competitions applied, and that, therefore, if the player replaced his ball directly behind the spot it occupied after he had missed the putt, the penalty was two strokes only, the second putt thus counting as in the competition, though it is fairly clear that the competitor never intended it for it. “But,” said the committee, “otherwise he was disqualified.” Those who discover feelings and frames of mind behind the mask of simple sentences would be moved to say, in this case, that in that last simple sentence St. Andrews was trying to cover up somewhat the absurd position to which the rules brought this case; for it was clear that the essence of the problem in relation to the law was as to whether the player replaced his ball behind the spot where it first stopped, which came simply to this—Was he short of the hole the first time, or did his ball run to either side? If he was short, then he was saved, and he is allowed to go on under penalty of two strokes; but if he over-ran the hole—which from the golf point of view was better than to be short—or if he went to either side, then he would be disqualified. That ruling has grown since then.

Pity the club committees in their constant troubles. Was ever committee so sorely beset as that which had come, by devious means, to knowledge of the faults of its members, and when honour seemed to forbid that the knowledge should be acted upon, though otherwise would an injustice be done to the sinless golfers. It was in County Sligo. A medal competition had been played, and when all was over the members of the committee—as such high officers constantly solicitous for the welfare of things will—wandered through the rooms and the corridors of the club. And it came to pass that one of them overheard a conversation that he was not supposed to overhear, between two members of the club, in which it was alleged that certain competitors had played on the putting greens before starting. The committeeman knew then that these men should be disqualified; but how was he to act? He told his colleagues, but they likewise were sore in mind as to whether they were justified in taking notice of the fact that had thus come to their knowledge. Were they bound to investigate this matter, and prove it one way or the other, or was it sufficient if they waited for someone to lay a formal objection? In their despair they appealed to St. Andrews; but this again is one of the nice points that the chief authority would rather others settled for themselves, and they said accordingly, that the committee must use their own discretion as to whether it was a case for their interference.

Upon other occasions the committee at St. Andrews has been called upon to indicate the proper course of procedure when a ball, after being played, lodged in the turned-up part of a player’s trousers. It has been somewhat naïvely asked by Kenmare whether, in a mixed foursome, when the lady missed the ball off the tee, she should “try” again, or whether her gallant partner should rid the tee of that persistent ball. It had to tell the County Down Club that a player could not carry a special flat board round with him from which to make his tee shots; and it has had to straighten out some quite frightful mix-ups in ladies’ competitions. Sometimes it happens that some casual decision of this sort serves a good purpose in bringing the portion of the golf world that has been somewhat inclined to wander, back to its duty in the observance of the strict letter of the law, as in the autumn of 1906, when on the appeal of Aldeburgh it declared how, when in long grass or anything of the kind, the player was only entitled to move so much of the obstruction as would enable him to find his ball in the first instance, and was not entitled to arrange things so that he could see it while attempting to play it. A player is not so entitled to a full view of his ball, though he will sometimes tell you that he is.

III

That which was regarded by our ancestors as a most amazing feat, namely, holing with the tee shot, has become exceeding common. One week not long ago it was done in five different parts of the country, and in three other separate weeks there were four cases reported. Why this increase, then, of doing holes in 1? The reason is simple after all. It is not that it is any easier to do the trick than it used to be. Probably it is rather harder, since it is more difficult to flop the rubber-cored ball down plump on the green at the short holes than it used to be in the days of the late lamented gutta, and a good deal harder to make it sink down into the hole as it ought to do when it gets there, instead of running around it and then away, and generally behaving badly. If it were any easier to do than it was formerly, would not the champions be doing it? But they are not. Harry Vardon has still only one hole in 1 to his credit, and while Braid gets his 2’s very often, the 1’s don’t come his way. The simple reason for the frequency is the great increase of golf. Everybody plays golf now and is always playing, and in such circumstances somebody must always be holing in 1, or very nearly. That is the simple fact, and the man who now performs this feat is no longer worthy of a paragraph all to himself in the morning newspaper. He will simply go along with half a dozen others in the weekly list.

Still there is room for distinction in holing in 1 yet, and the men who crave for such notoriety need not despair. If every man can hole in 1, obviously the proper thing to do is to find some particular way of doing it that every man cannot equal, or at least is not likely to do. For example, J. S. Caird, the Newcastle-on-Tyne professional, was out playing the other day, when in the course of his game he took the fifteenth in 1 in a very strange way. He popped his ball up into the air with his mashie, and down it came plump into the hole, falling clean into the tin and never bouncing out again! Fancy pitching into the hole in 1! Luckily the caddie was standing there and took out the flag in time, and one cannot be surprised that he was so overcome with the strangeness of the thing that happened, that his imagination was fired until he saw something of the supernatural in it, and believed that his eyes had witnessed more than they really had. At all events, to the players and to the people afterwards he described in the most circumstantial and convincing manner how the ball at one time seemed to be flying far past the green, but how when just above him it came to a sudden stop in mid-air and then fell vertically into the hole! Why were we not told the name of this ball?

Another advance on the simple feat of holing in one stroke is to do it twice within a year. The first man to do this was Mr. L. Stuart Anderson, who took the tenth and fifteenth at Balgownie (Aberdeen) in 1 in 1895. Since then I have heard of three other men having done it, one at Fort Anne, another at Bristol, and the third at Tunbridge Wells. Mr. Anderson, by the way, who is now the secretary of the Royal Portrush Club, holds the record for the greatest number of times that one man has done a hole in 1; and here again is another suggestion to the ambitious one-stroke man. Mr. Anderson has done it seven times. He began by doing it at the expense of his sister, Miss Blanche, at North Berwick, which perhaps did not matter much, as sisters are indulgent, and wound up for the time being by doing it (the seventh at Tavistock) in the presence of and in a match against a parson, which, to say the least, was indelicate. I have heard of a lady who has done this thing four times. Another out-of-the-way feat is to hole in 1 just when you hear that someone else has done so. One April evening, when the course at Heaton Moor had not the appearance of stirring events happening upon it, such as would go down into history as records, two of the members of the club, not playing together, did two different holes in 1 each. At Christmas time in 1899 a most remarkable feat was performed by Mr. P. H. Morton, celebrated in his day as a Cambridge bowler, who took the first hole on the Meyrick course at Bournemouth twice in one day, morning and afternoon, with his shot from the tee. It is a better achievement than usual to take a tolerably long hole in one stroke, and, in this class, honours at present are with Mr. J. F. Anderson, who with a wind behind him and playing on a frost-bound course got the ninth at St. Andrews in a single shot, and the ninth measures 277 yards. It must be accounted excellent also to do the trick one-handed, as did an amateur with the promising name of Willie Park when playing to the eleventh on the relief course at Troon. Mr. Park had to do it with one arm or not at all, for he has only one, and he was certainly to be congratulated on the fact of his unfortunate state not preventing him from graduating as a hole-in-oner.

Men who seem to have an abnormal sense of humour say that it is killing to do a hole in 1 when the other man is giving you a stroke. The other man has then to do it in nothing to halve, or 1 less than nothing to win, and the situation is delightful. I have authentic information of this situation having arisen, and it was rendered all the more interesting from the circumstance that the man giving the stroke was an Open Champion, and the other party was a lady. It was at the twelfth hole at Walton Heath, and one need not hesitate to say that the man who was giving the stroke was James Braid, who thought awhile on the wonders of this most interesting world, and then took a short cut to the next tee without troubling to play the short hole.

Concerning the coincidence connected with the name of Park, just noticed, it may have been perceived that two of our greatest heroes in these matters are of the name of Anderson. This coincidence can be carried a long step farther, for perhaps the most valuable hole in 1 ever gained was by another Anderson, and that was Jamie, the champion. He was playing for the championship at Prestwick and making his last round. He knew he was very close up, and that he had nothing to spare. He was playing the next to the last hole on the course as it used to be—not as it is—and was just about to hit his tee shot when a girl standing close by remarked to her father that the player had teed his ball outside the teeing ground, and that accordingly, if he played his shot from there, he would be disqualified altogether. Jamie heard, looked, and quietly removed his ball and placed it within the limited space. Then he made his shot and holed out in 1, and very properly he raised his cap to the little girl and said, “Thank you, miss!” for she had done him a very good turn indeed. A few minutes later he was in possession of the Championship Cup. That was in 1878. It is clear that the Andersons are the men who do the holes in 1, particularly as another of them, Mr. W. W. Anderson, once in 1893 worked most gradually and systematically up to a hole in 1 at North Berwick by taking the fourth in 3, the fifth in 2, and the sixth in the minimum 1. One in 1 and three in 6!

The worst of these tricks is that you don’t get anything for doing them; you must pay instead. The injustice of this arrangement has been borne in to many minds, notably to that of Mr. Balfour. The right honourable gentleman has never holed in 1, but he has done a hole in two strokes when he received a stroke from his opponent at it, and his caddie ingeniously argued with him that this was exactly the same thing—2 − 1 = 1. It was [Point Garry] out at North Berwick, and Mr. Balfour was playing with Tom Dunn. “I am astonished!” said Mr. Balfour, pretending that he was. “Am I to pay you for looking at me doing this? Should I not rather receive the money for performing the feat?” But he paid.

There is one hole in the world where you do get paid for achieving a 1, that is if you happen to do it at either the Easter, Whitsuntide, or Autumn meetings. This is what is called the “Island Hole” on the course of the Royal Ashdown Forest Club in Sussex. It is an excellent hole, and a gentleman who played it on one occasion fell so much in love with it that he endowed it with a sum of £5, the accumulated interest on the sum to go to the competitor at any of the meetings named who should do this trick of getting it in 1. Ever since the endowment was made the interest has been growing and growing, and nobody has qualified for it. Money accumulates so fast once it gets a fair start, that we can imagine this interest some day amounting to a fortune, and then what a scene there will be at the Island Hole at Easter when the golfer, having been training at the Redan, the Maiden, and a few like holes for a whole month previously, comes here with weird clubs and balls made of lead, and has greed written in large characters across his face.

The moral of the hole in 1 is excellently stated by a great master of the game. It demands not only a perfect shot but a perfect fluke. It is a case of the gods giving to them that have, and those that have not are cast into the bunker in front of the green.

IV

Curious, indeed, are some items in the list of the feats of golf. In the game heroic there is testimony to the pluck, perseverance, and enthusiasm of Mr. J. W. Spalding, who in the spring of a recent season came by an awful motor smash in France and lost an eye, but had no sooner risen from the hospital bed and been sent to Italy to recuperate than he was at his golf again, playing himself back with his single eye to the game of scratch quality that he enjoyed before, and—good for you, Mr. Spalding—but a few weeks went by ere one more scratch medal came his way. Nor shall we forget how a popular champion struggled home to the seventy-second green at Prestwick while the blood was oozing from his lungs.

There are feats of other kinds, as those which count as freaks, poor things enough but wondered at by some. What shall we say of the Pittsburg golfer who wagered four thousand dollars that he could play a ball over four and a half miles of the city streets in one hundred and fifty strokes? Beginning at five o’clock in the morning, he did this thing in one hundred and nineteen strokes, but lost a thousand dollars in damage done to property on the way. That man found an emulator in London who undertook to play a ball from Ludgate Circus to a fountain basin in Trafalgar Square. There are men who like to drive fine balls from the glass faces of other people’s expensive watches, and others who prefer the tamer sport of driving from the eggs of hens. There was the man of Sandwich, who, with a champagne bottle as his only “club,” played, and—Oh, shame upon it!—beat a neophyte who carried a full bag of the most improved clubs. There was the old-time golfer who lofted balls over the spire of St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, and another who tooled his gutty from Bruntsfield Links to the top of Arthur’s Seat. Better and more purposeful was the practice which Mr. Laidlay used to undertake before championships, when, with Jack White for caddie, he would play a ball from the first tee at North Berwick to the Roundell Hole at Gullane, six miles away, by way of the Eel Burn Hole, the sands along the shore, the neighbourhood of the fishermen’s cottages, and away over Muirfield and the rough country to the top of the hill, playing from whatever lie his ball chanced to find, and once doing this course in a total of ninety-seven strokes.

V

Do we not sometimes hear one sort of sportsmen make it a complaint against golf, that the player does not run any personal risk of injury to his life or his limbs? Some of these men will tell you that you only arrive at real sport when such dangers are incurred. It may be so, but we shall not on that account seek to increase the risks of golf. It is one of the glories of the game that it is such fine sport and commands the wild enthusiasm of the best sportsmen, though it threatens the life neither of the player nor any of the living creatures made by God that give the fulness to Nature, and add, though it may be unconsciously, to the golfer’s joy as he strides over the links on a fine morning. In other sports, when man goes wandering over the hills, he takes his gun with him that he may kill something. Leave him alone with Nature, and as the lord of creation he is impelled to go forward to the attack on the lesser beings. In golf alone does he roam over the country and by the side of the sea with never a thought of what he may kill passing through his mind. He has a great joy in his own life, and he is all benevolence and wishful for the happy life of others.

Things have been killed—accidentally—at golf. Many luckless birds have got in the way of tee shots, and even a fish lost its life on a golf course, and is now in a glass case in the clubhouse at Totteridge. By some devious means it got on to the course one day when there had been heavy rains and much overflowing all about. And—let it be whispered to the shooters and the mighty hunters!—men have been maimed, and even killed on golf links, though we pray that, despite the extra sport, there may be no more of them, and that the single pain of the game may be the skin-blisters and corns that sometimes will come up at the bottom of the left forefinger and elsewhere. I did not think better of golf as a sport when one day, in playing my way outwards on the North Berwick links, a ball from a hidden tee came upon me unawares and carried the pipe that I was smoking away with it for some twenty or thirty yards, while I stood to wonder what was happening. And even by his own deeds may a man [court] perils, for we heard the other day that one was playing at Ravenscar when he took a full mashie shot with the object of clearing a stone wall; but the ball struck the wall and rebounded with great force against his head. And from his head it rebounded again over the wall, so it was said; and it was not astonishing to hear that the player was slightly stunned! If adventure in the form of fierce conflict with wild beasts and reptiles is what the full-blooded sportsman wishes, he may have it. A member of the Royal Sydney Club played his ball down a hole, and he put his hand down it to see if he could recover the ball. He seized hold of something soft and drew out a venomous brown snake—which he hurriedly pushed back. I am told by my golfing directory that at Umtala, in Rhodesia, “the course consists of nine holes. In addition to other hazards, lions are occasionally in evidence.” I happen to have had some private confirmation of this report, and it is told me that if ever a golfer in Umtala indulged himself in such a freak as golf by candlelight, as players have been known to do elsewhere, he might not complete the game that he had projected, for the king of beasts is accustomed to prowl over the land at night, and picks up any little living thing that he may find about. In other respects there is something quaint about this golf at Umtala, for I am informed that in the daytime the course is frequented by crows with white bands round their necks, which go by the name of “Free Kirk Ministers.” They are thieves, and now and again they swoop down and fly away again with the ball.

They are fine pioneers of the game in South Africa, and it deserves to prosper there. They have needed strong hearts and much patience and forbearance. I have been to golf with a man who has lately come back from a short visit there, and he says that their “greens” look as if they were covered with millions of garnets; and poor as the putting may be from some points of view, it can be performed with marvellous accuracy, and the people of the Colonies deny that anybody loves the game more than they do, or is more enthusiastic in it than they are. Their trials are uncommon and severe, but they become accustomed to them. At Wynberg, or some place like that, there is a lake to carry at a short hole, and one knows what sometimes happens when there is a water hazard between the tee and the green, one shot away. Here the avoidance of it is not made any the easier, because a long line of Kaffir boys is formed up on the near side of the lake, stripped, with eyes aflame with eagerness, and wildly gesticulating with their arms and hands, and jostling and scolding at each other while they seem to be appealing “Me! me! me!” to the golfer on the tee. Away the ball goes from the tee, and at the slightest indication that it was struck with dangerous inaccuracy, splash go all the Kaffir boys into the water. It is very much like the game of throwing sixpences overboard when your ship of voyage is at anchor off some Eastern port.

VI

Rummaging through a second-hand book shop in Oxford Street one day, I came upon an old volume of sporting anecdotes published far back in 1867, and long since out of print and forgotten. Turning over the pages in the evening, and encountering therein many stories of doughty deeds by river and on field and moor, I came at last upon what must evidently be the original version of the story which has been more briefly told by others of the golf match at night for £500 a hole, and I cannot do better than quote it direct from the book. One of the contributors was quoting from a letter he had received from a well-known sporting friend of his, in which this gentleman gave him a short description of golf, about which nobody else belonging to the book appeared to know anything. In his prefatory remarks concerning the game the correspondent said: “The game of golf is quite a Scotch game; it is played at Blackheath, Wimbledon Common, and a few other places in England; but the players are always Scotchmen. It is a game requiring a good eye and great skill; and people who get over the first difficulties of the game are generally quite as fond of it as the English are of cricket.” With no disparagement of the attractions of cricket, one would be inclined to say that in these days the English who get over the first difficulties of the game of golf, and even those unfortunates who do not get over those difficulties, are much fonder of it than the said English are of cricket.

Then, concerning that great match, the correspondent writes: “Lord Kennedy and the late Mr. Cruickshank, of Langley Park, were good players, and had frequent matches for large sums of money; but the most remarkable match ever played by them came off during the Montrose race week many years since. At the race ordinary they got up a match of three holes, for £500 each hole, and agreed to play it then and there. It was about ten or half-past ten p.m. and quite dark. No light was allowed except one lantern placed on the hole, and another carried by the attendant of the player, in order that they might ascertain to whom the ball struck belonged. We all moved down to the golf course to see this curious match. Boys were placed along the course, who were accustomed to the game, to listen to the flight of the balls, and to run to the spot where a ball struck and rested on the ground. I do not remember which of the players won the odd hole; it was won, I know, by only one hole. But the most remarkable part of the match was, that they made out their holes with much about the same number of strokes that they usually did when playing in daylight. I think, on an average, that they took about five or six strokes in daylight, and in the dark six or seven. They were, however, in the constant habit of playing over the Montrose course.” Surely this must be accounted one of the most extraordinary games of golf we have heard of.

VII

In days gone by the position of the lady in the great world of golf was something of a doubtful quantity, but there can be no question that she is now an established institution, and that she will stay. There have been men who have said that golf is not a lady’s game, and many who still stoutly maintain that it is at all events only a game for very young ladies who have not taken upon themselves any serious domestic cares. But it makes little difference what they say. For the first time in history a married lady won the Ladies’ Championship in 1906. The ladies have a golf union of their own, which is the kind of thing that a large section of rebellious men have been sighing for for many years, but are apparently still far from getting. Moreover, they have an inter-county championship, which again is what men say they ought to have, but cannot get.

Some of the oldest but least common golf traditions have reference to women, and it seems to be the fact that one of the first monarchs in England or Scotland who ever sought pleasure and relaxation in trundling a golf ball over the links was Mary Queen of Scots, and that she played on golfing ground no less celebrated than St. Andrews. This was in 1563. During that winter Mary occupied a house in South Street, and it is generally believed that she yielded to the spell of the place and played golf on the links with Chastelard, the favourite, who was subsequently beheaded. Although the evidence that she did thus play at St. Andrews is not conclusive, it is very likely that she did so, for it is quite certain that she played at Edinburgh and elsewhere, and it is variously quoted as a specimen of her heartlessness on the one hand and of her enthusiasm for the game on the other, that she was found playing it only a few days after the murder of her husband.

It is suggested that the golfing ancestors of the present lady players were fish girls, and the evidence on the point is comprised in a minute of the Royal Musselburgh Golf Club, dated 14th December 1810, which reads thus: “The club to present by subscription a handsome new creel and shawl to the best Female Golfer who plays on the annual occasion on 1st January next, old style (12th January, new), to be intimated to the Fish Ladies by William Robertson, the officer of the club. Two of the best Barcelona silk handkerchiefs to be added to the above premium of the creel.—(Signed) Alex. G. Hunter, Captain.”

But the modern golfing ladies absolutely ignore all this ancient history, and, in a manner, started afresh with a Year 1 on the inception of their championship, like the French people did at the time of their big Revolution. What happened before did not count. Thus, from their point of view, they arrived at a sort of millennium straight away, having no brakes of custom and conservatism on their wheel of progress.

Consequently it is no business of the modern writer to argue as to whether the fair sex ought or ought not to play golf; the fact is there that they do, and that more of them do so every week. And they do it very whole-heartedly. In the box-rooms of the houses of golfing ladies are sundry old tennis racquets with their stringing limp, despised and rejected, and their once favourite croquet mallets have been cut down in the shaft and are now used for odd jobs of carpentering about the house. It is said that the golfing girl does not care a jot what she wears on the links or—mirabile dictu!—what she looks like, so long as she has boots or shoes on with which she can get a firm stance, or upper arrangements which enable her to swing with ease. Thus one hears that she has enormous nails in her footgear, wears the loosest of Irish homespun costumes, and wouldn’t be seen in a picture hat. And she is a fine, robust, healthy creature, who loves the game as much as anyone. The great professionals say that she is a splendid pupil—better even than the men. Harry Vardon holds that the American ladies—whom he has studied on their native links—are better and more thorough than ours; but he thinks that ours are very good when they roll up their sleeves and give up the big hats. “They seem (ladies in general, that is) to take closer and deeper notice of the hints you give them, and to retain the points of the lesson longer in their memories,” says Vardon, and James Braid concurs in the judgment. The only drawback to all this big hitting, hard tramping, and devil-may-care spirit of the girl on the links is that, according to Miss May Hezlet, one of the queens of the links, it enlarges the hands and feet! But think of the freedom!

When the ladies play among themselves—as they generally do—they employ, according to report, a golfing vocabulary of their own, which, though unconventional, let it be said in haste, is quite proper. Elsewhere than in happy England, the blessedness of whose sporting girls has been sung by Gilbert of the Savoy, it may not be the same; indeed it appeared in the newspapers a little while since that the minister of a fashionable church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, declared from his pulpit one Sunday that information had reached him that “women who went to church on Sunday, went to golf on Monday and swore like troopers!” When this was brought to the attention of the English ladies, they said that the information that had been given to the reverend gentleman was very likely true, as those ladies probably played such a very bad game. In England there was no occasion to make use of such expletives as were suggested, and a “Dash!” and “Oh, you naughty, naughty little ball” were generally found sufficient to meet the exigencies of the most trying situations. At one time there seemed to be some considerable rivalry and jealousy, quite characteristically feminine, between the British and American lady golfers. But Miss Rhona Adair as was went over to the States and won all her matches, the strain of the effort—believing that she really had the credit of her country at stake—being, so it was authoritatively said, largely responsible for the breakdown in her health that ensued. Then the Americans sent over a big team of ladies to try to capture our Ladies’ Championship with one of them. The battlefield was at Cromer, and such a scene was there as one by one the American flags were hauled down! At the end of the meeting the British lioness held undisputed possession of the field, and she placed the Cup on her tea table.

VIII

Perhaps there is more to be said for keeping one’s score for the round when playing a match than is allowed by many people who occasionally discuss this matter with some heat. It may be agreed at once that the golfer who consistently subordinates the importance and interest of his match to his anxiety regarding his aggregate score is to be condemned, and more than ever so when his reckoning of his figures is done openly and audibly, and when he is guilty of remarking, for example, a splendidly fought match being all square at the eighteenth tee, that he has a 4 left for 79, showing in what direction his strongest ambition lies for the time being. Such a person is an undesirable opponent, and a nuisance on the links. In match play the match is the thing, and those who do not want the match, but only the score, should go out alone with their caddies. Yet at the same time it must be remembered that a man’s scores for the round are often the only real indication that can be afforded him of knowing what exactly is his form for the time being, and how well or badly he is playing, and it is eminently desirable that he should from time to time be posted with this knowledge, which in either case should act as an incentive towards the improvement of his game. A man may be winning all his matches with two or three holes to spare, and if he is of a placid temperament and not given to any closely discriminating analysis of the details of his own game, he may often be living in a fool’s paradise with regard to the quality of his golf and the accuracy of his handicap. It may be true that handicaps are provided chiefly for match-play purposes, and that if a man can win half his matches with the handicap that is given him, there is not much cause for fault-finding; but, after all, handicaps are supposed to represent the relative strengths of all players, even though they do not, and it is reasonable to expect that the holder of a certain handicap should be able to go round his course, say, one time in three or four at a net score that would come out at par. One must doubt whether the average seven or eight handicap man does this, which, of course, leads to the usual conclusion that the general tendency in medium handicaps in these days is to make them too flattering.

And, again, when a player finds himself winning his match with so much ease that the match itself has really very little interest for him, if any at all, when he is playing well and his opponent’s game has gone completely to the dogs, it is surely pardonable for him to concentrate his chief attention upon his score for the round, so long as he does not do it obtrusively, and does nothing to indicate to his opponent that he has other things in mind besides the question as to whether he shall achieve victory at the twelfth or thirteenth hole. It is simply a matter of common sense and good manners, and all scores should be kept mentally, and should not be spoken of until the round is over. The keeping of a score will often urge a man to greater effort and the display of greater skill in a particular emergency, and will thus tend to the improvement of his game. Nearly all players of great skill and long experience agree that there is nothing in the world like much score play for the betterment of the golfer. It strengthens the sense of responsibility, and of the need for the utmost concentration of thought and effort upon every shot that is made, and when a golfer has taught himself to do this he has gone a long way towards the achievement of that severe self-discipline which is an essential characteristic of the good and sound player whose game has always to be feared. It is because they have not that self-discipline and have not cultivated that sense of responsibility, that the majority of amateurs are absolutely terrorised by a card and rendered incapable even of playing anything like their real game. They do not so much fear to make a bad shot when it will only mean a lost hole, which may be won back five minutes later; but it is a different thing when the bad shot may cost three strokes, which have to enter into the final reckoning. Yet the bad shot is equally bad in either case and ought to be equally regretted, but is not. And if an amateur does not keep some mental account of his score when engaged in matches, he has scarcely any other opportunity of practising medal play, since it is not customary and is not desirable that pairs should go out together matched with each other on the strokes for the round and not on holes.

Apart from the objections which have been urged against it, and which it has been suggested may not be quite so well founded as some people appear to think, one is inclined to fancy that in many cases one of the drawbacks to the continual counting of one’s score is the inclination that is bred in the player to self-deception, and in the course of our golf we come across many curious instances of it. The simplest and most frequent is the waiving of the lost stroke for a stymie. If the player’s ball is within two feet of the hole when the stymie is laid him, it may be legitimate enough for him to reckon that if he had been engaged in pure score play he would have holed the putt that he was in the actual circumstances unable to hole, and therefore to deduct a stroke from the actual number taken on the round. But in the weakness of their human nature many who are thus engaged in score counting go much farther than this in giving themselves the benefits of doubts. It is difficult or impossible for them to draw any line between that which it was very likely they would do and that which they might possibly do. If for the purposes of their score they give themselves the two-feet putt which they would have holed but for the stymie, then surely there can be no objection to giving themselves a thirty-inch putt, and if that, then one also at a yard, and a yard and a half—two yards, three yards, four. And, pursuing this process of self-cheating, you will find the golfer submitting it to himself that he may count it as one stroke to get down, when he is fifteen or twenty feet from the hole, on the reasoning that many a time in his life before he had holed such putts, and was certain to do so again, so why not this time?

This is but one of the many frauds that players are brought to practise upon themselves in their yearning for a good round. Have we not known them to give themselves a four or five feet putt when their opponents had already given up the hole, because, though they had the time and opportunity for making the stroke, they were afraid that they might miss it, and so spoil that nice score which they were building up? They say to themselves that if they did putt it they would be certain to succeed, so what matter. And worse still is the case of the man who goes up to his ball in such a circumstance and putts at it, perhaps with one hand, pretending to himself that he is not trying! Yet if the ball goes in he feels a wholesome satisfaction of having done his duty by his card; and if it does not go in he still counts it as having done so, because it would have done if he had tried properly. There is also the case of the other man who, having missed such a putt by half an inch, perhaps unluckily, makes a bargain with himself that if he can do that putt immediately and successfully four times one after the other, he will count it to him after all, having thus proved that it was well within the scope of his ability, and that his first failure was an accident and not likely to occur again. And I have heard of men who, counting their scores, and having obtained a lie of most exceptional badness after a good shot, have declined to include in their mental reckoning the fruitless stroke that followed, on the ground that the chances of their getting such a lie in a medal round were a thousand to one against!

Strangest case of all, I once played with a man who told me at the end of his round what a good score he had done, and proceeded to detail the figures 4 5 5 3, etc. “But,” I said, “you were in the bunker at the first hole and took 6.” “Yes,” he said, “but in counting my score I always give myself a 4 at the first hole, no matter what I take; because, don’t you see, if I were out to make the best return possible, as if trying to break a record, I could play the first hole two or three times, if necessary, until I got my par 4, and then go on with that round. I would be giving up the round each time when I failed, and starting a fresh round; so, you see, the 4 at the first is always certain, and so I always count it, whatever I do.” I saw,

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive,”

even to deceive ourselves.

Thus does this score counting and this yearning for one’s record round breed a moral cowardice in such men. There is only one score to count, and that is the one which would be passed according to the rules of stroke play. If golfers must count scores they must be just to themselves, and they must not even temper their justice with any mercy, for the laws of golf are inexorable, and in them there is no mercy.

IX

There are many who hold that the most exasperating opponent of all is he who is afflicted with an amazing indecision when about to make his very shortest putts. For a minute he will stand with his putter to the ball as if in abject fear of his fate, and surely at such a time there are strange fancies flying through his brain. They must be like the fancies of a drowning man. It was agreed among a company of his friends that these must be the jerky thoughts of such a man whom they well know when he was engaged gloomily upon the dreaded task of putting a ball that lay eighteen inches from the hole, the little patch of putting green that intervened being perfectly smooth and level:—

This is a very simple job,
And when I have holed the ball
I shall be certain of my half-crown.
Still, I must be careful. It is very easy to miss these short putts;
And I have missed many thousands, costing me
Many pounds—scores of pounds.
And now that I am up against it,
And looking at this putt,
It does not seem quite so easy as it did at first.
It will require most careful management—a most delicate tap,
And very accurate gauging of strength.
One needs to be very cool and deliberate over these things.
One’s nerves, and stomach, and liver must be in prime condition.
I wish I had not been out to dinner last night.
Was it Willie Park or Ben Sayers
Who said that the man who could putt could beat anybody?
I believe him—Willie or Ben.
This is really a most awkward putt.
The green looks slower than the others. It is very rough.
Why don’t the committee sack the greenkeeper,
Who ought to be a market gardener?
It is like a bunker between
My ball and the hole. Such very rough stuff.
One, two, three—six—nine—why!
There are eleven big blades of grass
Sticking up like the rushes at Westward Ho!
The grass becomes so very stiff and wiry in this very hot weather.
(Yes, it is too hot to putt properly.)
My ball will never break through this grass.
It is one of the hardest putts I have ever seen,
I wish I had more loft on my putter.
I was an ass not to bring that other one out from my locker,
Where it is eating its head off (so to speak).
I think, also, that a little cut would do this putt a lot of good.
But how? The green slopes from the left;
Yet it seemed to slope from the right.
Also, it goes downwards to the hole.
This is a perfect devil of a putt!
I know my stance for putting is not good,
But Harry Vardon says that every man has his own stance,
So perhaps it is all right.
But I had better move my left foot; it seems in the way.
I see that two—four—six—seven of the pimples on this ball
Are quite flat.
Nobody can putt with a ball like that.
A man ought to be allowed to change his ball
Even on the green at times like this.
I must allow for those pimples.
Confound that fellow Brown!
He seems to be waiting.
And he is smoking his dirty shag so much
That I can hardly see the hole for smoke.
If I lose this hole I shall lose the match.
I am quite with Johnny Low in his new idea for handicapping,
When he says some of us should be allowed to play
Our bad shots over again.
In that case I would have one good smack at this ball
To get the strength and the hang of
Everything. And I am certain—yes, I am quite absolutely certain—
That I would hole the ball next time.
However, what does it matter?
Better men then I have missed such putts,
And I am not a chicken—live a hard life—lot of work—
Office to-night—awful day to-morrow.
And as the wife was saying—
Let me see. Oh! hang this putt!
He can have his half-crown if he wants it,
But I am going to have one good smack
At this ball. Now—
No, that was wrong. Now, yes, yes—

My godfathers!
And my godmothers!
I have missed that putt again!

[When the ball came to a standstill it was just an inch and a half short of the hole, and considerably to the left of the proper line to the middle.]

X

Some of those cantankerous people who have no sympathy with games, and but a limited confidence in the wise precept that the healthy mind is most frequently to be found in association with the healthy body—practical people they like to call themselves—will sometimes ask you what is the good of golf. It is generally useless to attempt to humour them by advancing the proposition that it returns a dividend of fifty per cent. in mental and physical efficiency, and seventy-five in the general happiness of the subject.

What are really the least convincing examples of the practical value of golf are the most effective in argument against such folks. With them it may count a word in favour of the game that a man once playing it found that his ball from a full drive came to rest on a sixpence which had evidently dropped through a hole in the pocket of a previous player. Here, indeed, was a material practical gain! They will be impressed also with the possibilities of the game when they are told a little story of how a man, who was not in quest of art treasures at the time, discovered an old master accidentally, and entirely through the medium of his golf. It was in this way. A Montreal art dealer was playing the game on a country course one day in 1903, when he sliced a ball so badly that away it went through the window of a cottage hard by. Thereupon there came out from it an old lady, a French Canadian, who was possessed of remarkable power of speech, of which the golfer was given much evidence. Presently, when her attack was somewhat exhausted, the poor golfer offered to recompense her for the damage done to the window; but then it was put to him that the broken glass was not the only casualty. The ball, after passing through the window, had continued its course of destruction by breaking the glass that covered the picture; and without making any examination of the nature of this damage the player agreed that he would give a matter of a pound for the picture besides paying for the broken window. This soothed the feelings of the lady of the cottage, and she pressed upon him the picture, for the damage to which he had paid so handsomely. He took it away with him, and at home in the evening he was led in a spirit of curiosity to make some examination of it, when, to his astonishment, he discovered that it was a Dutch interior by Teniers, which he sold a few days later for £500. To the credit of this golfer be it said, he sent a cheque for half the amount to the cottager. This is an excellent story to tell to the absurd and practical people, and a true one.

It might be of service to add to it an account of a shot that was played on one occasion by a gentleman of no less scientific importance than Professor John Milne, who is known as a great seismologist, the man who is most in evidence when earthquakes are troubling. When the earth is still the Professor will leave his instruments in the Isle of Wight to their own care for a period, and he will wander away to the links for some golf. To what great feat has the golf of this professor led him? Why, he of all men became the first to drive a golf ball across the Victoria Falls on the Zambesi River—a hundred and sixty yards of roaring, foaming water. That was when the British Association went for its annual meeting to South Africa, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the celebrated Cambridge pathologist, was so much impressed by the achievement, that he too attempted to drive the Zambesi, and succeeded. But these are the things that may be done by Professors once, and not always. Two more balls were teed on the bank, and the Professors smote them with their clubs, but those balls were claimed by the Zambesi, and perchance they have been digested by the crocodiles. Now here you have something done by golf which was not golf, but which marked the advance of civilisation into the dark regions of the African continent. Our practical friends must allow this to the credit of the game, not only for the achievement in itself, but for the possibilities that it suggests, for is not a picture at once conjured up of the resourceful golfer driving a ball from the shore to a sinking ship, when all other means of establishing communication therewith had failed? To the ball there will be tied a silken thread, and the thread will help a string across, and the string will drag a rope. Thus must we plead for golf!

While in these serious aspects of the battle of life the game is thus to come to our aid, it shall be of similar service also in the gentler paths. Once upon a time a maker of golf balls told me how he had suspected a rival of putting cores from old balls made by him A into all so-called new ones made by the rival B. Therefore A for a little while wound a tiny piece of tissue paper with the rubber of his cores, and on the paper there was written A’s name and address. Some time later the tissues came home again through the medium of the balls that bore the name of B. There was this damning evidence of the pilfering of the cores. This story is not told as a hint to the trade, but surely it will convey one to ingenious persons who wish for a mode of secret communication with others which will be sure and safe. May it not be that some Romeo of to-day has already come by the device of lofting a ball or two on to the balcony of the fair Juliet, who in the seclusion of her chamber may be discovered in operation upon the cover with hair-pins and fire-irons, and presently in raptures upon the endearments expressed in the billet doux of her Romeo?

Perhaps it will not avail us as golfers to tell our practical friends that the principles of the application of physical force which have been taught us in the game, as of the steady body, the fixed centre of movement, and of the hand being under the constant leadership of the eye, have benefited us not merely in the playing of other games, such as billiards and tennis, but in the attainment of greater proficiency in some of the most practical and useful of domestic occupations, so that the man of all others who may be depended upon to hang up the pictures in a new house as pictures should be hanged, is the golfer who has got his handicap down to 6. We will tell also to the critic of our game that it affords a scope for a kind of humour that is of occasional service to some wits and others. It helps them to raise a laugh over the tea-cups when they say that they will take the odd or two more in sugar. We do not like this jugglery with the terms, and it is only to be excused in such exceptional cases as when the doctor tells the new golfer that his temperature is 99° and the patient inquires anxiously as to what the bogey is; or when, in discussing the frowning fortunes of some unfortunate acquaintance who has had a hard time in life, and is called upon for severe labour in his last days, it is said of this poor chap that he is playing the nineteenth hole and has made an indifferent drive. But, in seriousness, we like our golf to be kept sacred to itself, and unassociated with the generally duller pursuits of this workaday world.

XI

Is there not a considerable superstition of the links? Even great players have old clubs that they carry about with them, not so much for their practical value as for the luck of the thing, as they fancy it; and a man once said at Prestwick that he always carried in his bag a queer-shaped iron, though he never used it in these days. This was because on one famous occasion many years before, when he was seven down with eight to play, and won the match by a brilliancy that did not belong to him, he could only account for it by the circumstance that this club had somehow found its way into his bag by accident. As a small acknowledgment to the gods, and a hint that such favours would be welcome in the future, he vowed that he would carry that club with him on the links for evermore, but that never would he play with it. And he keeps his vow most steadfastly, to the irritation of the burdened caddie.

Some sentiment clings to that cleek belonging to Mr. Edward Blackwell, which, it has been said, is “shaped like an old boot,” but which, as we all know, has done work upon which any cleek might be congratulated. And is it not declared that before Mr. Travis set out to play in the championship at Sandwich, Ben Sayers lent to him for mascot his favourite spoon?

Other golfers [have] other fancies. Some have it that it is unlucky to go out to play without a supply of money, for then surely shall the half-crown be lost; and others fear that it might go hardly with them if they had not the company of their favourite pipe. On severely important occasions, Andrew Kirkaldy will hie himself beforehand to his tobacconists in St. Andrews and buy himself a new pipe for luck. Does not special fortune attach to special golfing clothes, and is not the light grey jacket that which brings most luck? Think of all the fine players who jacket themselves in this way with darker wear below, which is out of the usual order. Mr. Hilton has a jacket which goes always with him as the lamb went with Mary, and has thus played its part in championships innumerable. This is a jacket that has won its place in golfing history.

The superstitions about the winning of certain holes are stupid and general. Why is it such an unfortunate thing with some people to win the first hole? And yet do they always try to win, and do not bemoan their fate if they lose. A trifle more reason, perhaps, is there in the old couplet:

“Two up and five to play,
Never won a match, they say.”

But of course matches have been won when the winner was two up with five to go, hundreds and thousands of them. There is one man of high championship rank who has a list of exceptions to this rule, which he applies for his own consolation when the fates decree that he shall be two holes to the good as he stands upon the fourteenth tee. If it suits him, he will put it that the spell will not work if it happened that he fluked the thirteenth with a long putt; and he holds upon suitable occasion that it has nothing to do with a foursome. One may suppose that the essence of the idea is that the man who is two up at this state of the game is just short of being in nearly the strongest position possible, and is sometimes a little inclined to be slack in consequence; and then, if he loses the next hole, and is only one up with four to go, a sudden fear seizes him: he feels that he must fight for his life, becomes flurried, presses—and then the rest of the tale is soon told. But the best and the worst of the proverb lies in its recitation by the man who is down when his opponent, bold in confidence, is taking the honour at the fourteenth.

It must be held as an unfortunate thing to play a ball into a graveyard, and it is better, perhaps, that one’s attention should not be called to the memorial stone hard by the eleventh tee at Deal, which tells of a foul murder committed upon some fair maiden at this spot in the long ago when Deal was unacquainted with the game that has given her fame.

We hear that the most famous lady players carry charms when engaged in their most important games. She who won fame as Miss Rhona Adair is said to have invariably worn a particular ribbon with a gruesome device of skull and crossbones upon it whenever she very much wanted to win her match. White heather is supposed to be a most potent charm, and it has been told as a secret that some ladies decline to wash their hands between rounds, though luncheon comes in the interval, lest evil should befall them afterwards.

[THE WANDERING PLAYER]

I

The golfers and other people who know nothing of St. Andrews are often inclined to fancy that some of the enthusiasm professed by those who have a tolerable golfing acquaintance with it is affected, because it “is the proper thing,” and because it harmonises with the feelings of many revered members of the old school of the game. Perhaps such scepticism is pardonable, particularly when it is known that there have been many hundreds of golfers who have gone to St. Andrews once and failed to be impressed by it, and have not hesitated to declare their doubts about its supremacy on their return to their native links. These people belong to one of three classes. The first is the smallest of the three, consisting of good golfers of sound discrimination, whose idiosyncrasies of taste lead them honestly to the conclusion that St. Andrews is greatly overrated, and that it has superiors in various other greens. The second and largest batch is composed of men who lack both the necessary golfing knowledge and the true golfing spirit. The third consists of those who have not had sufficient time to know, for verily St. Andrews is, to a large extent, a cultivated taste, and there are many worthy golfers to whom its first appeal has not been entirely convincing. There is a more or less vague something that attracts instantly, but the rest only comes to the Southron stranger after two or three, or even more, visits of fairly long duration.

The English golfer does not generally love St. Andrews at first sight, but he shows that interest in her which leads him to talk about her and awakens the suspicions of his friends. Then he may speak of her with indifference, but he goes back to her again and again, and at last one day, when he returns to his home after one of these visits, he feels an exquisite soreness at heart, a sweet longing, a strange exaltation, and he knows that a change has come over his golfing life, that he is at last in love with St. Andrews, and that he cannot do without her. Forthwith his plans for future golfing expeditions are changed and modified. He must now always think of St. Andrews. If he is a man of leisure he must go there at least once a year, and even if he has but little time to spare he will be going to Scotland once in a twelvemonth with his bag of clubs, and must so arrange his itinerary that he shall touch Leuchars Junction going or coming, and shall run down that little strip of railway which makes to the golfer the finest travelling in the world, for two or three days of heartening play on the premier links. All golf is good, but there is something subtle about the St. Andrews golf which makes it not quite like the other, and the man who learns to love it, though the love come in his riper years, when the emotions are slow of action and may be weak in result, is faithful to it for the rest of his golfing days.

Probably no man has been able completely to define the charm of the place. Its charm is of its golf, for though it has some natural beauty, and is greatly historic and of celebrity for its ruins, it casts no enduring spell over the man who does not know the use of a driver. The constant talk of it and its tradition has something to do with the charm, no doubt. The stranger, who has never struck a ball there, feels something of nervous ecstasy as he hears the brakes go on the train that slows down on its approach to the station. There, during the last two minutes of his journey, is a view of the links, the Swilcan Burn, the players going out to the second and approaching the seventeenth—and there goes a ball on to that famous road!—just like the fathers of golf used to do in the olden days as it is written in the books. Then, walking in St. Andrews, one seems to breathe golf as never before. All the men and boys one sees are players or caddies; there is a knot of men at the street-corner talking about the 76 that one of the professionals did in his evening round; there are many golf shops; it is all golf. On the walls, and in the hotels and post offices, there are displayed official notices, giving the warning that those who play on the course with irons only, or who practise putting on the eighteenth green, may be fined 20s. or—wonderful enactment!—be sent to prison for a period. A personage of no less consequence than a Cabinet Minister, this being Mr. Asquith, has been stopped under this rule. The pipes that one hears seem to be skirling a song of the greatness of the game and the glory of the men who used to play it here in the olden days. Above all, one comes instantly by a deep sense as of walking on hallowed ground, of being one of the heirs to a great heritage in golf, and to a great responsibility. Life and the game are stronger things than they used to be. That same subtle oppression of soul is felt as when one has a first glance at the Pyramids or at the tomb of the great Napoleon in the Invalides. These things stand for what was a great might, and in its golf St. Andrews is truly mighty.

And so it comes that the spirit of the game seems to brood over this hallowed spot, and stirs the golfer with fine imaginings and gives to him great impulses. It is all so different from anything else. On the evening of his first day he knows that St. Andrews is not like the other places, and when, after his first rest, he kisses the morning, he is glad and he is exalted, because he is at St. Andrews, and there is not a man or woman in the place who will not talk to him of the game that he loves and sympathise with him in his ardour. The golfer has come home at last.

It is difficult to describe the merits of the wonderful old course. It is there. The people who do not know it cannot be made to understand, and the people who do know it have not to be told. It would be hard for anybody to prove that it is not the best, if the severest, test of scientific golf. Nothing but scientific golf will avail the player here. Of late years people have been railing against the bunkers on the course, and the increase thereof; but after all it is to be remembered that the placing of the majority of these bunkers has been the result of the aggregate of thought of some of the best golfers in the world for a period of scores of years, and they must be considered in the spirit that Mr. John Low suggests, that no bunker can really be unfair. It is there to be avoided, and it is the best shot that avoids it. No doubt this view might lead to awkward conclusions if pressed in some cases, but it is apparently sound as a general principle of scientific golf, as apart from the mere pastime and the sensual passion for hard hitting. If a bunker is in the middle of the course at just the distance of a good drive, it is obviously the duty of the driver to play to one side or the other and avoid it; and that is just the characteristic of proper play at nearly all of the St. Andrews holes, that the tee shot has not only to be cleanly played, and at the proper strength and so forth, but that over and above all these things it has to be so accurately placed as on no other course. Position means everything at St. Andrews, and the number and variety of the undulations of the course, the constant bunker, and the extreme diversity of the glorious putting greens and the approaches thereto, bring it about that a man may play a hole a thousand times and it has something new to offer him every time, and he might play rounds on this course all the time from his childhood to his old age, and those of his last years would be riper with interest than any that went before. Here, indeed, is a course for character; there is nothing like it.

II

Hoylake is new in comparison, but Hoylake is old for England, and it is the leader of golf in the southern section of the kingdom. Hoylake has fine traditions of its own which it would not exchange for those of any other centre or club, and while it has always had the most perfect respect for the dignity and the conservation of the game, it has occasionally shown a commendable disposition towards useful progress. It was the Royal Liverpool Club at Hoylake that took the initiative in the establishment of the Amateur Championship and the international matches; and at other times it has impelled St. Andrews towards unwilling, but necessary, action. The club may look back with pride upon the earnestness and dignity of its pioneers. They were true golfers of the old and most worthy school, and when they began the game there they had, as in some other old places, to take a pinch of sand out of the hole that they had just putted into in order to make a tee for their next drive.

By some it is said that it was the establishment of the links at Westward Ho! that gave the idea for making a golf course at Hoylake to the Liverpool golfers. Some of the people of West Kirby played there about the middle of the last century, and the Rabbit Warren, as the present links was then called, was used for golf about 1865. The Royal Liverpool Club was established four years later, and for twenty-six years, before the building of its present handsome clubhouse, was housed in the Royal Hotel.

In those days the course began on the hotel side, but with the change of residence there was some necessary changing of the order of the holes, the old first becoming the present last, the old second being now numbered the first, and the old last is the present seventeenth. The land of the links is leased from Lord Stanley of Alderley, whose ancestors acquired it in the time of Queen Elizabeth; and it is significant of the increasing richness of Hoylake, due largely to its golf, that the assessment upon the club by the union overseers, which used to be £165, was recently raised to £500.

In the quality of the golfers that it has produced Hoylake can challenge the whole world of golf. It alone has found an amateur winner for the Open Championship—two of them. It bred the inimitable Mr. John Ball, who has six times won the Amateur Championship—1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1899, and 1907—and is good enough to win it again; and he won the Open Championship in 1890, thus holding both titles at the same time, being the only golfer who has ever done so, and quite likely who ever will. A brass tablet in the entrance-hall and the clock over the clubhouse commemorate this achievement. Mr. Harold Hilton, winner of the Open Championship in 1892 and 1897, and the amateur event in 1900 and 1901; and Mr. John Graham, junr., one of the finest products of Hoylake, despite his insistence that he is a Scottish golfer when it comes to International rivalry, is now at the top of his game, and is good enough to win one Championship and very nearly another. So true is it that a fine course will breed fine players.

Of the quality of Hoylake there can be no two opinions. It is one of the very best courses in the world, and by common consent it and Deal are the two best in England. Hoylake is far better than it looks. The first hole is generally cited as being one of the best two-shot holes to be found anywhere, and it is always good, no matter where the wind is. The course looks easy. If you play thoroughly well it may not be difficult, but if you do not play well it rends your miserable game asunder. What the possibilities for failure are, were exemplified in a grossly exaggerated manner in the final for the Amateur Championship in 1906, when the finalists halved the sixth hole, which goes by the name of the Briars, in 9! They lost their heads, and a player needs his head at Hoylake. The course is famous for its putting greens. They are fine now; but they are not what they used to be, for in the old days they were so magnificent that it used to be said by everybody that it was a sin to walk upon them. The water has in late years been drawn from the land for the purposes of wells, and this has made a difference.

St. Andrews and Hoylake—a noble pair!

III

Choosing a companion for a golfing holiday is at all times a serious business, and the light and thoughtless manner in which some young people perform the task is, in the interests of their own future golfing welfare, deplorable. Young people are mentioned advisedly, for you do not find the old golfers making their selections hastily, and they do not live to regret those that they make as do the hot-blooded youths who are swayed by the fancies of a moment. These select at haste, and often enough they repent bitterly before the golfing trip is over. The same nice discrimination should be exercised in the choice of such a companion as would be, or ought to be, in the choice of a wife, and many of the points that have to be taken into consideration are similar. As a general principle, youth should not mate with age for the purposes of many days’ golf in their own exclusive company away from home, when the twain are cast upon their own joint resources and have their pleasure and their welfare bound up with each other. It is a good thing that there should have been a long and tolerably thorough acquaintance beforehand, and there should be some approximate equality in playing ability. The partners to this important contract should be satisfied above all things that not only are their ideas and ideals concerning the good game largely alike, and their tastes outside the game agreeable to each other, but that their temperaments agree to the point that they can make the necessary allowances for each other’s waywardness of conduct, when in the interests of continued concord it becomes imperatively necessary that this should be done. Trials of this kind will have to be endured, and it is well that there should be a firm resolution beforehand to bear with each other’s weaknesses, satisfied always of the high value of the man. Some old golfers have said, and wisely, that it is a good thing to go away on a golfing holiday with a man and never to golf with him—to get the game with others, and to talk of it with the companion of the trip at breakfast in the morning and at dinner when the play for the day is over; and there can be little doubt that in this maxim there is much wisdom, though it is not necessary to carry the recommendation to the extreme. Too much familiarity with the game of one man breeds some contempt for it, even though it be a game that is more remunerative in holes than that possessed by the other; and while there are no rivals like old rivals, still, if their rivalry is uninterrupted it becomes dull and uninteresting.

IV

There is an old golfer who says that it cost him many weeks of failure, and many hundreds of pounds, to come by that experience in conducting a golfing holiday as enabled him to make a complete success of such always afterwards. For the benefit of others of the smallest experience, who are liable to err grievously, he offers the following precepts:—

“However keen one may be, and however much one may enjoy the excellent golf that is obtained on a good seaside course, it is a great mistake to play too much during a short holiday, and failure to appreciate this fact has completely spoiled more golfing holidays than any other cause. The early keenness is followed by carelessness, and after a while the game becomes somewhat of a taskmaster. Then one’s game suffers severely, and even a strong physical constitution is hardly equal to three rounds a day kept up constantly. Yet that is what many holiday golfers try to do, and when they have finished their vacation they are sick of the mention of golf, and wish they had gone fishing or shooting instead. My advice is never to play more than two rounds a day, and to play no golf at all on two days of the week; whilst, if the holiday lasts a month, the man will be all the better for a four or five days’ rest in the middle of it. He will then enjoy all his golf, and the entire holiday will be much more of a success.

“On a holiday course, where there are many visitors, one sees a greater variety of clubs and golfing implements than anywhere else, and numerous novelties of a more or less attractive character. However favourably many of these ideas may strike you, do your best to resist the inclination to invest in them, because, if you once begin doing this, you will have a dreadful quantity of rubbish to take home. A golfer who thinks several times before he buys a new club when he is at home, somehow seems to be a very irresponsible creature when he is holidaying, and will purchase wonderful brasseys, niblicks, and putters at the [slightest] provocation.

“As soon as you get on to your holiday seaside course, don’t make the mistake of beginning to play for larger money stakes than you are accustomed to do on your home links, even when you are invited to do so and you may feel it difficult to refuse. Comparatively small beginnings in this direction have a way of developing before the holiday is far advanced into gambling on the game to an extent that the player cannot afford. Apart from this important view of the matter, the pleasure of playing the game is completely ruined. A ball on the match is enough for anybody, no matter what balance he may have at his bank, and in starting a golfing holiday a man will be wise to make up his mind in advance that he will not play for more.

“When you are a complete stranger and alone, and you beg the club steward that he will find you matches, do not hesitate when he offers you an opponent, even though the latter’s handicap is either too large or too small to give you the most enjoyable match. Take him on at once, and be thankful. The steward, who is always an obliging fellow, has a rather difficult task in suiting everybody, and you should be greatly obliged for the favour he does you in supplying you with any kind of match.

“If you are a long-handicap foozler, make your start for the round either very early in the morning or very late, say nine o’clock or half-past eleven. Either of these times is just as good as half-past ten, and you will miss the crowd, have a clear course, and spare yourself the anxiety of being a constant annoyance to the scratch men behind you if you started at the busy time. You will play a much better game.

“At the commencement don’t announce your handicap as either more or less than what it is at home, whatever your views upon the accuracy of the latter may be. If you say your handicap is more than it really is, you are grossly dishonest and a cheat, though some misguided players do so without any full sense of the grave responsibility of their action. On the other hand, many players with the best of motives say they are several strokes less than they really are, for the purpose of seeing what they can really do at a shorter handicap, and thus, as they put it, pull their game out. They also do it with the object of getting better matches, but their sins will find them out. They may very likely lose most of their matches, and their opponents, perhaps, will not care to play with them again, wanting something more to do. Besides, they may run up against some of their own club fellows, and then they may look rather foolish.

“Don’t give your newly-made opponent-friend a long account of your many brilliant performances on your home course, particularly if the account is by way of being an excuse for your falling off on the present occasion. The probability is that he will take a large discount off your story, and in any case he doesn’t care an old gutta what you do at home.

“Also, don’t make the shocking mistake of discussing with him the play and the manners of other visitors to the course with whom you have been having matches, or whom you have otherwise encountered on the green. It is very bad form, and, besides, after you have been denouncing some person or other, your companion may inform you that he is a friend of his.

“Don’t ask permission of your opponent to take your wife or your sister or your mother round the links with you to watch the match, even with the proviso that she shall keep at a convenient distance from you both. Like the good fellow he is sure to be, he will say at once that he will be delighted, and will be most agreeable. But would you be delighted, and would you play your best game in such circumstances? Would not the presence of a lady stranger rather irritate you, however gallant you might desire to be? And what if all the players on the links did this kind of thing? The proper place for ladies who do not play golf is the seashore.

“Do please remember that as a visitor to the links, even though you are made a temporary member, you have no right to be there, and are only admitted to the course by the courtesy of the members. This is a point in manners which is far too often neglected, and when the neglect is carried to an extreme the golfer may find his application for temporary membership refused another season. There must be no arrogance in your conduct in the clubhouse or on the green. Do not complain about the food or about the state of the course. You are not obliged to eat or to play there, and the members have got on very well in the past without you, and will doubtless survive your departure.

“Likewise remember that others who are playing on the course have at least as much right to do so as you, even if in your opinion they do not play such a high-class game as you do. Therefore don’t get into the habit of calling out ‘Fore!’ to the couple in front unless it is absolutely necessary to do so, and don’t complain loudly that people who take four putts on the green have no business to come to such good courses and interfere with the play of others.

“Assume that your opponent, though you do not know him well, is both a gentleman and a sportsman, as it is extremely likely is the case, and don’t allow any contrary idea to enter your mind unless the evidence in favour of it is overwhelming. Then say nothing about your suspicions, but simply make a convenient excuse when he asks you for another match.

“If a point of difficulty occurs in the course of your match, do not squabble with your opponent about the rules or stubbornly maintain your own position against his arguments. It is better to waive your point and even lose a hole than do so. You are unlikely to convince him, and it is quite possible that you yourself are in the wrong. Besides, you will score most heavily by gracefully waiving what you feel is your right. He will feel that afterwards.

“When you are leaving at the end of your holiday, do not forget to tender your best thanks to those to whom they are due. When you get home again don’t tell untruths about the great things you have done while on your holiday. The people to whom you tell them will not believe you. Indeed, you must be very careful as to how you tell the good part of the truth.”

V

When you are one of a special party that sets out for a sojourn at some place, solely for the reason of the golf that it affords, and when in due course, the time having been well and enjoyably spent on the links, your friends determine that they will return home or depart to some other place for golf, do not on any account yield to an impulse to stay behind them, on feeling that you could enjoy still a little more play, and persuading yourself that among the people you know who are staying in the place you may make up good matches. There will be no further enjoyment, for all the days that follow will suffer in comparison with those full ones that were spent when those bosom companions helped to the happiness in every hour. The course will not be the same; there will be a ghostly silence about the rooms of your lodging place, and the atmosphere of the town or village may seem unfriendly or at least indifferent; whereas before, in the independence of your association, you had not cared what it was, but formed a vague impression that the people were pleasantly conspiring to add to the comfort and the pleasure of this expedition.

On the first morning afterwards it does really seem that all the people who had stayed there had gone also, and not merely the three who had come with you. You breakfast perhaps alone in a vast apartment. The head waiter seems to mix a great sympathy with his attentions, suggesting that he appreciates the loneliness and the misery of your bereavement. Out of this wretched place to the clubhouse, and there is no one there, and the obliging secretary or steward is unable to give any definite information as to the prospects of a morning match. You take out a young professional, and, well though he plays, a poor thing is this match with him in comparison with those that were of the days before, when you knew always the thoughts and fears that were passing through the mind of your opponent, and knew almost as well as your own, the clubs with which he played his shots, and exactly how they did their work. The ghosts of your friends seem to walk in front of you down the fairway leading to every hole, and as you leave the putting green and go forward moodily to the next tee, there is the shadow form of one of them pointing with his club to the exact spot where you remember his ball was teed yesterday, and you feel momentarily a happier man as you think you can see his characteristic swing and the glint of joy that comes into his eyes as he finds he has made the carry that it needed a strong heart to attempt with this wind blowing back from the green. You do not wish to appear inconsiderate, and not to show yourself as a man of proper feeling and a good sportsman in the presence of another who can hardly display any open resentment at your attitude, but you cannot help this walking moodily and listlessly to the tee, as if not caring anything for the game that is in progress. There is no familiar talk on the old familiar topics. It is a relief when the match is ended, and you feel less pain at being beaten at the thirteenth hole than you have done for a long time.

“I can get a good match for you this afternoon, sir,” says that excellent steward when you go back into the clubhouse. “Oh, thanks very much, Brown,” you say, “but it doesn’t matter. I think I shall go back this afternoon.” And by the afternoon train you go, and as you are whirled along the seashore and through the open country and the tunnels, a first thought is that yesterday at the same time those three merry fellows were running along the same course, and were perhaps seated in that very carriage. They have gained a day on you in everything. Next time, my friends, we will all go back together.

VI

The customary classification of our golf courses into the inland and seaside groups is crude and inadequate. Apart from that there are many inland courses, and still more seaside courses, that differ from each other more than some in the one class differ from the others in the second one. The golfer of experience comes subconsciously to put all the courses that he knows well into different groups, those in each group having some distinguishing characteristic that specially appeals to his fancy or his style of play. The student of golfing architecture has no difficulty in separating the links that we know best into four or five clearly distinguished classes, or schools as we might call them. The contour and peculiarities of the country over which the course is laid are largely instrumental in determining the class to which each one belongs, but the hand of man makes the final decision, and so it is that on many good courses we have the quality exposed and the temperaments suggested of the great golfing architects of dying and dead generations. It may be that they had very unpliable materials with which to work; but after all in the planning of most holes there are two or three alternatives. One designer would determine that the golfers on his course should play over a high sand hill, while another would have inclined to avoiding it or fashioning another hole from another tee which would take the player round it.

One of the foremost of these schools of golf architecture is the Heroic. The name has only to be given, and every golfer of experience knows at once what links he would select as belonging to it—links with a fine length and needing a strong arm and a brave heart for successful play upon them, links which are broad and bold in their characteristics, never easy, and terribly difficult when Nature is in a tantrum mood. There are not so many drive and pitch holes on such courses, and when one is encountered the pitch calls for the most thoughtful golf. There are long, bare, bunkered holes that chill the blood of the nervous golfer as he goes forth from the tee with a glance at the brasseys in his bag. It seems as if he wanders into a vast space, a wilderness where the littleness of man is emphasised. As a leading example of golfing architecture of the Heroic school, I would select the fine course at Deal, and another noble specimen is Prestwick. There is a disposition in these times to make some new inland courses on such models so far as limited natural opportunities permit, and much the best of those that have been created so far is Walton Heath, where it is really Heroic golf all the way from the first tee to the home green.

A school which has yielded many fine courses is the Romantic. The lights and shades of such courses are in high contrast, and their colouring is rich. Hazards, big and full of character of their own, abound at almost every hole; there are rocks or sandhills everywhere, and likely enough the course is set in a frame of rich scenery surrounding. Some people would describe such courses as being “very sporting.” When one thinks of the Romantic school, and of the great days of adventure that one has spent when paying homage to its dead masters, one thinks of Troon and of North Berwick; and if of this type one must select one that is away from the sea, there is Sunningdale which clearly belongs to it, though its features are not so highly developed. The Braid Hills course is certainly attached to the Romantic school. The architects who were of this school, and the men who most admire their work, are warm-blooded, human players, who like risks and the overcoming of them, and who would have their pulses throb with the joy of life when they play on the links. They like, as it is said, to be called upon to take their lives in their hands at every stroke of their play. This is great golf.

As to which of all the schools provides the truest golf it is hard to say, since few men would agree on what is the truest golf. But quite likely the links of the Æsthetic school would be most frequently mentioned in this connection. There has been a subtle art at work in the planning of every hole. The architects have taken their patch of land, and, scorning all convention, have been inspired by great impulses in the selection and arrangement of the line of play. They have had moods and caprices, but they have been men of great genius, born and bred in a high atmosphere of the game. Like all other men of great independence of thought and action, they court and receive severe criticism; but at the end of it all the greatness, the superbness of the work is admitted, and its fame will for ever endure. There is character in it at every glance, but it is not such as is obtrusive, as at Troon. Here there is the perfect art that conceals art, and it is a testimony to its perfection that men go on discussing it for ever and ever, just as they still think and worry over the emotions that passed through the mind of Hamlet, and are not all agreed upon them. How many different readings, as it were, can one not give to a hole at St. Andrews—almost any hole on the old course. St. Andrews is the masterpiece of the Æsthetic school—profound, ingenious, intricate. Here and there we see a little of the influence of the Heroic school; the Romantic has had less. But always the Æsthetic school is a law unto itself, and its finished work is not to be likened to that of any other. Hoylake is of this school, though the example is not so pure and unaffected by the two great rival branches of architectural art as St. Andrews. Nevertheless it is distinctly Æsthetic, and there is no other course that is worthy of inclusion in this particular class.

We have another school, which should be called the Victorian. It has many merits, and it is very prolific. It represents a sober and industrious kind of golf, but it is utterly lacking in any inspiration. It is as business like and exact as you please, a six-o’clock-sharp morning-dress kind of golf. It conduces to good habits, and will make some good golfers. But on the whole it is rather prim and dull, and one never feels the blood running in the veins when contemplating it. Muirfield is one of the Victorian school, and there are one or two of the satellites of Hoylake, on its own seaboard, that are of it also. Sandwich has much of the Victorian element in it; but it is redeemed by the strong influence of other schools, as by the extreme romanticism of the Maiden. The suburbs in their own small way went over to Victorianism entirely at the outset, partly because their circumstances exerted such an irresistible tendency in that direction. A drive over one bunker and a pitch over the next one is Victorianism in its crudest form; but perhaps after all the suburbs are lucky in being able to attach themselves to any school. I am told that the Victorian school has had paramount influence in America.

VII

Of the links we know, those by the sea, to which do we return for the tenth or the twentieth time joyously as to a delightful friend in a charming home? Instantly we murmur the name of dear North Berwick. The old player has conviction in this immediate choice by instinct, though the question is not one which he answers lightly. In his heart he has corners for many old loves, and as he brings each one up for contemplation and counts her many charms, he thinks that surely she is the fairest of them all. But inevitably when they have all been passed in review his fancy brings him back to one, and he clings to the remembrance of her, confessing that she is not like the others. There is a subtlety in her charm, a fascination in her manners, an “altogether” which cannot be resisted. She is gentler than St. Andrews, a sweet innocent maiden wading with bare feet among the rocks of the Haddington coast, whom you love to tease and toy with; while my lady of Fifeshire is colder and of great dignity and compelling attractions. It is a fine sea at North Berwick, and though in the play one may think little enough of the sea, it is good to have the wavelets kissing the pebbles hard by an occasional green, and to hear their soothing lapping. The sound is grateful to the hard-tried nerves. There are few parts of the North Berwick course where one cannot see a little of the ocean, while here and there, such as at Point Garry and Perfection, the greens are placed in enchanting spots. Then the air is like wine. At North Berwick one is in East Lothian, in the centre of the finest golfing country in the world. In two or three weeks one may tire of the same links, the monotony of the same round, the same bunkers, the same greens. Here there are many others at hand, and all within the shortest of journeys. Chiefly there is Gullane the grand. When you are at Gullane you may think it is better than North Berwick as a place to stay and holiday in. It is quieter, quainter, more old fashioned, a trifle more like the country, and the golf is glorious. Such is the turf on old Gullane, that one feels that one should never tread upon the greens save in stockinged feet. And the man who has not captured the eighth and ninth up the hill in 4’s, and then on the summit stood hard by the Roundell to survey the finest panorama to be seen on a golf course, and taste the finest air, has something yet to know of the utmost pleasures of a golfer’s existence. Then there are Muirfield, and Archerfield, Kilspindie, and all the rest of them, so near that strong men have played on the whole collection in one day. But when you go back to North Berwick in the evening you think you will stay there still. You like the comfort of the place, and the green, and you want your Bass Rock.

It is the place to conjure up a mental picture of some great events of days gone by, as:

It is nearly sixty years ago, and there is tense excitement on the seven-hole course, as it was in those far-off days. A great foursome is being played, and there is £400 at issue. Old Tom and Allan Robertson are on one side, and the Dunns are against them on the other. They have played over two other greens and are even, and now they are to decide. The Dunns have had a great lead, but at the second last hole in the fifth and last round the game is square. Then the Dunns’ ball lodges behind a stone, and the brothers are in a frenzy, and lose their heads in several vain endeavours to extricate it. Old Tom and Allan are dormy, and the £400 goes to them at the last hole.

This picture fades away, and another framed in mournful black comes up in its place. Old Tom and his boy, the great Young Tom, are on the green, matched against old Willie Park and Mungo Park. Some news comes. It is bad news. It is taken to the green, and the others bow their heads for a moment but say nothing to the boy. But as soon as may be they take him off the links, and put him in a sailing boat to sail across the water with Old Tom, his father, to St. Andrews on the Fifeshire coast. And there he reels as he looks upon the pallid face of his much-beloved wife, her head laid upon a pillow, and the eyelids closed in death. Young Tom’s own death-warrant was signed that moment. The golfing history of North Berwick is full of the romance of the game.

VIII

In many sequestered places there are fine courses that the golfer in general knows little of. Demand of him suddenly that he shall tell you of a far-away seaside links where you may rest and play for a little while until the city calls you back, and by force of habit he will begin to murmur pleasantly about his Carnousties and his Gullanes and all the rest. They are excellent, most excellent; but we call for change, and where for the old wanderer is the change that is good enough? When he appeals to you, send him down in a cab to Paddington, bidding him take a ticket to Porthcawl, changing at Cardiff, for you may know that in the evening he will be happy, and that upon the next day the joy of life will have come again to a weary worker.

Porthcawl is a place that rests the man and gives balm to his troubled spirit. There is a fine links and the open Atlantic, and the Cymric spell is cast upon the sojourner—the feeling that one has relapsed from the severity of complicated civilisation for a little while to the peace and the simplicity of old Gwalia, the land of the real Briton. One day I was turning the pages of a small guide-book to South Wales, when I noticed that the topographer, in writing of Porthcawl, said somewhat complainingly that the coast round about there was “extremely desolate.” Beyond hinting that there were more rocks about it than were good for any well-ordered coast, he preferred not to go into details. He was describing things for the benefit of that curious person who is generally called “the tourist,” and he seemed to feel this was no place for him to linger with his charge. So in apologetic manner he gave his reader a small assortment of the usual kind of facts as an excuse for having mentioned Porthcawl at all. He told him, for example, that the novelist, R. D. Blackmore, who was a word scene-painter of breadth and effectiveness, placed the action of his “Maid of Sker” in this region of Porthcawl, and if he had had consideration for the golfer he would have added that there are landmarks of the story to be seen from all parts of the links. The tourist was further informed as to a local church, was acquainted with the curious fact that here there is a well of fresh water which rises and falls in a puzzling manner according to the going out and coming in respectively of the tide, and was supplied with some useful and indispensable knowledge about the character of the shipping with which the port had to deal. And then, as it was felt that the tourist must not tarry longer in such a place, he was hurried on to some other, where there were piers and bands, and a variety of historic remains for contemplation and study in serious moments.

Generally the requirements of the golfer are in inverse ratio to those of the tourist, and it is tolerably safe to predict that when a coast is described as “extremely desolate,” it represents a fine piece of golfing country. It is one of the good things of golf that it has come into our civilisation to use up all utterly barren and waste tracts of coastwise land, and that generally the more barren and waste the better they are for golf. Are not some of the best links there are in Britain situated on coasts that are to the non-golfing mind, uneducated to the beauty and charm of testing, full-blooded and yet scrupulously fair holes, quite naked of all attraction? And what an excellent arrangement of circumstances it is! The neighbourhood of Prestwick is sometimes by way of being “boomed” as a health resort, a place that affords a fine tonic to the lungs, and I believe the claim is well justified; but not all people would describe this spot in Ayrshire as being “interesting,” and there is certainly no kind of relation between the quality of the coast scenery and the inestimable grandeur, from the golfing point of view, of the Cardinal, the Himalayas, and above all of the glorious seventeenth, the Alps. And consider Sandwich. No tourist of discrimination has been seen, or will be, on these reclaimed wastes that have already given us one championship course, and lately a new links, which is of superlative quality. And the “extremely desolate” coast at Porthcawl which did not please our guide-book man, is found on acquaintance to be an excellent example of Nature’s impressionist seascape work, with savage rocks abounding. Even the name of Porthcawl smacks of coves and pirates, of breezes and big seas. Porthcawl sticks out so that there is nothing in the world between it and the United States of America except the Atlantic Ocean. Its golf links are on the very margin of the sea, contiguous to those black, sharp rocks—so near, indeed, that a really badly-hit ball may sometimes be sent dancing at all kinds of fantastic angles from one to another, until it comes to rest in an inaccessible place whence it will never be disturbed. Sometimes in the severer seasons, the sea, with the full, unbroken force of the Atlantic behind it, will be sent smashing along over the rocks, and even over the golf links too, until some of the bunkers are laden with salt water. Porthcawl is fine, and it is a fine change, and there are holes on the course that have a boldness and a vigour that stir the pulse of the golfing man. We play over the wall and up the hill to the turn, and there is South Wales and its ocean frame spread out at our feet, making us linger upon a glorious scene and sigh a little as we drive down the hillside to the first hole in.

IX

It is fine golf that is to be had now on Kent’s eastern seaboard, and each time one comes down into this neighbourhood with one’s bag of clubs, the more one is strengthened in the conviction as to its equal excellence with any other golfing district in the world, and the abundance of its fine prospects for the future. The magnificent character of the golf, chiefly that which is enjoyed under the authority of the Cinque Ports Club at Deal, is becoming better known and appreciated year by year, and even now the feeling is general that here is one of the finest links that were ever made for a championship to be played upon. The sister course of the Royal St. George’s Club is practically joined up to it, and now a little farther along the bay in the direction of Ramsgate is the new course of the Prince’s Club, and a very fine course too. So here we have stringed together along a small stretch of coast three of the very best courses that are to be found in the whole world of golf—one which is actually a championship course, a second which is perhaps by way of being so, and a third which may soon be mentioned in the same connection. There is enough good golfing land left in Pegwell Bay to make a fourth course, and some day not very far distant it may be made. Nature has here given to the golfer every natural advantage that it is possible to afford him in the preparation of those seaside links, the contemplation of which brings the light of pleasure into his eyes. Golf is great in our modern scheme of things, and some have said, without irreverence, that they see the shaping hand of Providence in short holes of such sporting quality as the Maiden and the Sandy Parlour, in those glorious last four holes at Deal, and in all that bumpy ground to be covered in approach play which calls for such an abundant exercise of the wits of the thoughtful golfer, and inevitably recalls to him some of the best characteristics of St. Andrews. So much, indeed, does all this place look as if it were made for golf, and intended to be a capital of golf, that a man with whom I played there once was led, while we were waiting at one of the tees, to the remark that if golf had never been invented it would surely have come to be so as soon as intelligent men had wandered hereabouts, so direct is the suggestion that is made by the nature and the contour of the land. One finds it difficult—nay, even impossible—to think of a better stretch of golfing land in the whole of England or Scotland, or anywhere where there are three links of this quality joined up to each other, so that, if so whimsically disposed, a golfer might play on from one to the other, and make a triple round of fifty-four holes.

Here, then, is a place which is eminently adapted to become a leader among golfing centres, and it would surprise no one if, at an early stage of the further evolution of golf and golfing matters, it came to be regarded as the chief of all. It is not to be overlooked that it enjoys the inestimable advantage of proximity to London. When London takes a fancy to such a thing as golf she likes to be its master, and will leave nothing undone to assert her supremacy. She has taken to golf, and Scotland already knows with what masterful zeal she is pursuing it. These seaside links of eastern Kent are to all intents and purposes London links, in that they are nearer than any other to London, and are fed almost exclusively from the capital. And a further advantage that the place possesses is in the fine bracing air with which it is enveloped, air which for its invigorating properties is hardly to be excelled anywhere in Great Britain. When the wind comes from the south-east with moderate strength, as it so often does down there, it is a fine thing for the golfer, and a stimulant not only to himself but his game.

The locality begins to feel, as one might say, like a great golfing centre. You know how St. Andrews and Carnoustie and North Berwick “feel” like that. The intelligent interest of the non-golfing people in the towns and villages round about is being awakened in the game, and they are all discovering in some way or other how they may make themselves to benefit by it. Particularly is this the case with regard to a certain good class of private hotels and boarding-houses catering specially, if not exclusively, for golfers. In all the great centres of the game one finds these places in abundance, and every player of experience knows how, in many respects, they are often to be preferred to the big hotels. Then we find a leading thoroughfare called Golf Road, houses called Golf Villas, establishments named Golf Bakeries and Golf Laundries, all of which little details are a sign that the game is coming to be regarded in the district as an “industry,” and the district is wise in arriving at such an understanding in good time. Moreover, one would be inclined to say that the standard of play down here is at least as high, taking it all round, as it is at any other big golfing centre. There are foozlers on every links, but more men with very short handicaps, men who have really come to grips with the game, are playing round Pegwell Bay than in most parts, chiefly because, whether member or visitor, the expense of playing is considerable, and the play itself is difficult, and the long-handicap men have discovered that there is not much fun in paying high rates for the privilege of spending week-ends in bunker practice. And yet another attribute of the large and important golfing centre does this neighbourhood possess, in the good quality of the caddies which in the course of many seasons it has at last developed. A man once said that if he saw the caddies beforehand he could tell what kind of golf was played in a place, and though this may have been going too far, there was a germ of truth in the idea. Mediocre links and mediocre players never produce good caddies, and the reverse argument generally holds good; and everybody knows that a good race of caddies is not to be produced in a couple of seasons. Oftentimes it needs at least a generation. But the caddies at Deal and Sandwich nowadays are excellent, and this is not such an unimportant matter as some people might imagine it to be.

X

When you think of it, there is no inconsiderable portion of our golfing lives that is spent in travelling to and from the links that are far from home, by railway and by motor-car, and if one falls into a reflective mood there are many experiences, some curious and some trying, that are to be called to mind in connection with these journeys. On the whole, perhaps, the reflection does not make for much joy, except in the knowledge that these are things of the past and are not likely to be repeated. When the assemblies for the championships are being made, there is less talk of current form than there is of adventures in travelling. Oh, the horrors of a wait at Dumfries in the small hours of a cold morning, when the mistake has been made of trying to get to Prestwick that way! Turned out from the comfortable, warm, snug sleeping-car at Carlisle, even the blanket and pillow that were vouchsafed to you on parting from the express are begrudged you now at this most icy, inhospitable Dumfries. With that curious, dirty, dazed feeling as of being a boiled owl, you watch the men throw the mails into the van that is to take them and you on to Ayr, and listen to them joking about the events of the previous night as if it were now really morning. You tell everybody what you think about Scottish common sense in not having a fire in any waiting-room and no place available for any refreshment, and the Scots themselves are too courteous to say what they must think of your common sense for a golfer in making this journey in this weird way. Then you get into a smelly, dirty carriage, and with jerks and jolts the train drags itself out of the station and slowly away along the line. Stop, stop, stop every two or three miles, but at last it is Ayr, and the worn-out golfer, cursing himself for his folly and others for their heathenism, gets out and steps forth into the land of Burns. But it is yet only a little past five o’clock, and all Ayr is fast asleep, and there are no fires, no refreshments, and no ways of getting to Prestwick just yet. This is to be a golfer! But all things end sometime except eternity, and at last you are at Prestwick, and the finest thing you ever did in your life was then to keep your first ball straight and uninfluenced by the gravestones in the churchyard, and to squeeze a heartening if a little fluky 3 at this first hole. My reader, be assured that the night train through Carlisle, and changing there and at Dumfries, is not the way to go to the west coast of Scotland where are Prestwick and Troon. Run through to Glasgow and down again, as indeed everybody but those crazy people who are always finding new ways of doing things, always do.

But generally night-travelling is an excellent thing when you get used to it, and it spares a day to golf. It is a fine thing to pack your bag of clubs away lovingly in your berth after a dinner at the London terminus, and before you turn off the light you look at them and think a “Good-night!” to them in a cheery way as of old and trusted companionship. “Off again, my friends!” you seem to say. “We have done this sort of thing before, eh? We know what we are going to do, you and I, eh? Yes, you are the fellows. Bonny boys, you are! Where? Didn’t you know? Why, North Berwick, of course! Now, bye-bye! Let’s sleep. Play in the morning.” And then you switch off the light, and slip away into dreamland where there are glorious holes on seaside courses, and presently there is a big thump on the door and that dream is spoiled and dispelled by a man’s gruff voice. But the next moment is one of those most worth living. The dream is realised or is in the realisation, for the caller brings you to your joyful senses by declaring that in fifteen more minutes you will be wheeling into Edinburgh. In those dreams which were helped by a soothing lullaby from the wheels below, the London was slipping away four hundred miles from the tail of the train, and here is Golf, its own rare land.

And what feats one can perform on a motor-car! And does. Just finished our putts on the home green at St. Andrews, and the sun going down, and up comes one of our impulsive party and says it is ordered that we go to Gullane to-night by car! Goodness! But it has to be, and in half an hour we are bowling along those Fifeshire roads, and we are ferried across from Burntisland in the gloom and run into Edinburgh. Good supper, some talk in a tone of suppressed excitement as if great adventures are afoot—as they are—and history is being made, and then we hoot-hoot away into the blackness of the night. And it is black farther on. And the blacker it is the faster that dare-devil man at the wheel makes her go. Running along roads the width of the car and stone walls on either side, while branches of trees are almost scraping the tops of our heads, and one might swear the speed-gauge has its finger on the fifty. “Mrs. Forman’s!” you say to the man beside you, to show you are not thinking of the awful risks as we dash by Musselburgh. Farther on a cap is lost in the black and windy night, but nobody complains. It is enough that all survived that terrible twist round the corner at Gosford. Aberlady! That is a fine thing to hear. “Will you stop here to-night, or come on to Gullane?” It is the end. You have indeed come through a great ordeal, and it is a great thing to be standing there in the night with your bag of clubs under your arm, and to be able to answer a greeting as it ought to be, and to let your thoughts slip away soon to the golf of the morning that is coming.

XI

But it is clear to me that the golfer who wishes to go golfing, and at the same time to live the richest and most adventurous life of the traveller, needs to take himself abroad and roam from course to course in Eastern and Central America. He will encounter many incidents that will interest and enliven him, as did the four eminent British professionals who some time since made a golfing expedition from here in the winter-time in search of Mexican treasure—dollars that were offered in open competition at San Pedro. They told me a great tale of their adventures on their return, and, as I have reason to believe, a strictly accurate one. Andrew Kirkaldy, Alexander Herd, Jack White, and Rowland Jones were the treasure-hunters, and dashing fellows they seemed as they boarded a special express at New York. Having started thence at five minutes to eleven one Wednesday morning, the train reached St. Louis at 1.30 on Thursday, having been much delayed by a wreck on the Wabash in which fourteen persons were killed and injured. This news added greatly to the discomfort of the four British golfers. They lunched at the Planters’ Hotel, went round the city, saw a performance at the theatre, and boarded the train again at half-past eight in the evening. Thereafter Messrs. Kirkaldy, Herd, White, and Jones were brought to realise some of the possibilities of travelling in through trains along the American Continent. They were in the last car of the train, and after the journey had been resumed about half an hour, there was a negative kind of happening in the form of a gradual slowing down and then a final stop of the train—or rather, as it proved, of the carriage. After waiting a little while in patience the party put their heads out of the window, and then they came to realise the horrible truth. Their carriage had become uncoupled, and the train had gone on and left them! Here was a state of things! There was no other train to get them through in time. Hundreds of pounds were to be picked up at San Pedro, and they would not be there to pick them up as they had intended. The prizes would have been a gift for them, and either “Andra” or Rowland Jones would have become an open champion of sorts at last. When these thoughts had chased each other through the minds of the great British quartette for half an hour, someone got up aloft, and, like the widow Twankey—or Sister Anne was it?—in the pantomime, said that he thought he saw something coming. Immediately afterwards he confessed he was mistaken, but he had scarcely admitted the mistake when the original statement was renewed with vigour. There was something, and eventually it was made out as a railway train. The four great British golfers were saved for Mexico, and they would yet win championships and dollars—at least they might do, as they might now prefer to put it. It seemed that after the train had parted company with its last carriage, in about a quarter of an hour somebody in the moving section happened to notice the circumstance, and remarked that it was rather curious that a carriage should be left down the line in that manner, and that there should be no fuss made. The matter being reported to the officials on the train they decided to put back and see if they could find the carriage containing, among others, the party of four great British golfers. As we have already seen, they did so. Then the whole train moved on again towards Mexico, and “Andra” went to sleep in his berth dreaming, perhaps, of the old course at home and of his doing the home hole in 2.

The four British golfers found things rather dull for the next two days, for nothing in particular happened while they were running through fifteen hundred miles of woods and prairie. On Saturday morning they got out of the train at San Antonio, Texas, in time for breakfast, and the same evening they reached Laredo, the Mexican border, where their luggage was examined. Spanish being the prevailing language, this process proved rather troublesome, especially as the officials had varying and peculiar views as to the goods on which duty should be paid. Some of the party had to pay it on their golf clubs, and others escaped. The train had hardly got going again when it was pulled up on account of an obstruction in front, and it was three hours before a further advance was made, the impediment being a freight-train which had run off the track. By this time Kirkaldy was sighing for a ride on the North British, and White was hoping that he might be allowed the privilege of making his last journey on earth on the beautiful South-Western. But there was more adventure to come.

The four great British golfers had heard awful tales of Mexicans and what they were capable of, but they understood the place was more civilised now—must be, as there was golf there. In the dead of night, while the famous quartette were wrapped in slumber, when White found himself back on to his drive, when Herd had nothing but good luck for a whole season, when Jones was pipping one Braid for the championship nearly every time, and when the fourth of the party of British golfers was doing a round on the links in Elysium in eighteen under par—there were robbers going through the car! They were real robbers, such as are commonly found on these trains in these parts. They went through the train “in the most approved style,” as it was said of them, and before the first streaks of the Mexican dawn had lit up the sky there were many men in that golfing train who were much poorer than when they went to sleep. One of the Boston amateurs going to the same tournament lost six hundred dollars, his gold watch, and trunk checks, and several others found that various sums of money belonging to them had disappeared. And how fared the four British golfers? Was it for fear of him, for respect, or for admiration, that the Mexican robber did not concern himself at all with the great British golfer? In due course they landed at Mexico City on Monday morning. The four British golfers were much impressed by the peculiar dress of the Mexicans, which they even found to be affected by the caddies. Andrew spoke a few preliminary words of greeting to the boys, but they only smiled, not understanding Scotch. But they showed a strong disposition to be good friends, an attitude which, as was subsequently discovered, was not entirely because they were great golfers. Caddies are much the same the wide world over. Of the further pursuit of the treasure by the four great British golfers, and of their many disappointments, the story has been already told.

XII

A celebrated golfer, being in one of his lighter moods, discussed with me the future association of aeroplanes and golf, and he observed that when the flying machines came they would be such boons and blessings to the golfing fraternity above all others as nobody imagined at the present time. He opined that no sooner did the flying machine become workable and reliable than every golfer who considered himself at all thorough, and took any proper care of his game, would think it his bounden duty to possess one. It would be as necessary to the playing of his true game as the nails in the soles of his boots and shoes, and he would be just as seriously handicapped without the one as the other. This was a startling proposition; but though it was a great exaggeration of an idea, the idea itself was sound, and was based on the wisest and most generally-accepted philosophy. It was submitted that the aeroplane would be very good for golf, inasmuch as it would do less towards putting a man off his game at the beginning of the day than any other form of locomotion from his place of residence to the golf course.

It is a disturbing reflection that practically everything that one does in these days that is not golf tends to injure one’s golf. Nothing has ever been discovered that with any consistency and regularity will improve it, except golf; the effect is always adverse, and perhaps this trying jealousy of the game adds something to its general fascination. Usually a more or less lengthy journey has to be made from the golfer’s home to the first tee, and it is this which is so much calculated to disturb his playing temperament. No matter how you make this journey it must be bad for your game, and the only difference between one way and another is in the degree of badness.

When a man has risen from his bed in the morning, thoroughly roused himself, and noticed that it is a fine day, he is at his best for golfing. After that all things put him off. Some authorities are very adverse to the cold bath, and others have even said that one’s breakfast ought not to be regarded as an absolutely loyal friend. But it is the journey to the links—with all its delays, irritations, inconveniences, and joltings—that does the most damage. Frequently this journey is a mixture of cabs, omnibuses, and trains. At one point or another you have very likely to run for either the omnibus or the train, and this is certain to do something towards putting you off. It may be only a little, but it is this trifle added to other similar trifles that make up a total sufficient to bring disaster to your driving and putting. If you do not need to run anywhere, you have to wait, and this irritates and does harm. Then the great vibration of the cab and the omnibus most seriously affect the nervous system.

The golfer may not be conscious of it, but the effect is there. How true this is may be judged by taking the extreme case of the motor-bicycle. A year or two ago large numbers of golfers who could not afford motor-cars went in for the cheaper kind of machine, but to a man they found them quite fatal to golf, and particularly to their putting, the vibration having reduced their nerves to such a state that delicacy of touch on the putting green was next to impossible. Ordinary bicycles are nearly as bad. In many respects motor-cars have great advantages, and have become very popular with golfers, but they are far from being the ideal form of locomotion. Here, again, there is vibration, and if you have anything in the nature of a fright on the road you may generally reckon that your game for the day is damaged to the extent of a number of strokes that varies with the individual. Having all these things and many more in mind, the superiority of the aeroplane, from the golfer’s point of view, becomes evident. It will take you from your door to the first tee, and, as there are no roads to jolt upon, one conceives that in the perfect aeroplane there will be no vibration, and, barring the effects of his breakfast, the golfer will be transported to the links in as nearly as possible the ideal state in which he rose from his bed.

XIII

Some footpaths count for very much in the playing of a hole, and at times call for and produce fine shots that would never be made if there were no path there. So sometimes they are good to the game; but generally they are merely an aggravation. You could hardly call a path or a road famous, but if you were asked which were the most notable you would probably call to mind first of all the path that goes across the first and eighteenth holes at St. Andrews, which is distinguished from others because of the devil-may-care spirit in which the general public defy injury and death by the way they saunter along it when such men as Edward Blackwell are standing on the first tee, and it is also a path among paths, because it has led to the cultivation of the most magnificent voice ever heard on any golf course. The man who has not heard Starter Greig fire his blast of warning through the hole in his box down the fairway—with a clap, and a bang against the horizon, for all the world like a discharge from a small brass gun—is still ignorant of one of the minor wonders of the golf world, and has a very inadequate perception of the possibilities of calling “Fore!” Likewise, one would say that of all roads—as superior to mere paths—that which skirts the seventeenth green on the same old course is the most remembered by the majority of good golfers—remembered sadly. How many golfers have had their brightest hopes dashed by that road when within sight of home and victory it would be a sorry task to count, but there lingers in my mind a dreadful scene when J. H. Taylor’s ball went there in the course of the 1905 championship meeting, from a not by any means unworthy shot, and of his trying, time after time, to get it back to the green, until when he had done so his nerves were tingling as would have been those of any man.

The paths and roads of Blackheath are altogether probably responsible for the making of a bigger and more enduring piece of golfing history than any others. Other footways may have despoiled great players of deserved honours, but thus their effects are chiefly destructive, and it cannot be claimed for them that they have made anything for the game. But the Blackheath paths and roads have been constructive in their effect upon the game, for they made the brassey. There is a fair consensus of opinion that this most necessary of modern clubs was first introduced on this course as a consequence of these paths and roads that had to be played from, and also partly on account of the gritty nature of the turf. In those days of the use of the brassey, when a Blackheath golfer appeared on a Scottish course, the caddies knew his headquarters at once. “He comes frae Blackheath,” they would say with some deprecation. “There’s naething but gravel pits and stones at Blackheath.”

XIV

However humble its merits may be, it is well that a man should be faithful always to his mother course, respectful of her, and that he should not speak and very tardily admit to himself the blemishes of her features. For it is always for him to remember that she, and she alone, gave the game to him that has yielded him so much happiness, and he owes to her a debt that he can never repay, save in constancy and gratitude. Therefore it is to be reckoned as a good thing in a golfer that, wherever the necessities and vicissitudes of life may take him to live, and for whatever other courses he may in mature years find a fondness and become attached to by membership, he should, if he can do it, always remain an associate of his first club, and should from time to time display some public attachment to its course, even though it be at some inconvenience to himself. It is a little act of filial homage that should not be neglected.

At such times he will be kind to her and will not chide her for her weaknesses. He will humour her good-naturedly. The sixteenth may be a better hole on another course, but do not say so now. Think how rich did that sixteenth here seem in those far-off days when the teething to the clubs was first being done. What terrors had its bunkers! What a big, lusty, and not to say a brutal one, did it seem then; but now to the time-worn golfer, if the truth must be whispered for once to himself, that old sixteenth seems something of a milksop, and can be played in ten different ways with a half-hearted drive and something of a mashie or iron. How happy we were despite the constant troubles in those olden days, when we were always with our mother links, and knew no others! The old men of golf came and told us of the great courses that they had encountered in their travels—such wonderful holes, such amazing bunkers, such marvellous putting greens! These travellers’ tales were pleasant to listen to, and they fired the imagination; but after all we returned with some content to our mother links.

And then, what golfer does not remember the day, particularly if he was then no longer a child in years, when he went away for the first time from that course and paid a visit to one of those celebrated of which so much is written in the books and on which so many fine matches and championships are played? This is always an epoch, and a stirring one in every golfing life. There are many wild emotions in the man when for the first time he takes his club to play a shot on this foreign course of so much renown. If he is an intelligent man, and an impartial one, he sees the merit and the glory, and he admits it without reservation. He feels that now he has gone out into the great world, and that there are more wonders in it than even his utmost fancy had suspected. He is like the Queen of Sheba who went to see the magnificence of Solomon, confessing then that it was a true report that she had heard in her own land, though she believed not until her eyes had seen, when she knew that the half had not been told her. Out alone on this wonderful course the feeling of loneliness and helplessness will come upon this immature player. Truly the half had not been told to him, and in mortal agony in some “Hell” or other, or in a Devil’s Kitchen or a Punchbowl, or it may be in the sandy wastes of a Sahara or in a crevasse on the heights of the Alps or the Himalayas—how, then, will he be reminded of the tender indulgences of his mother links, of her constant kindness, and of the way in which she humoured his youthful caprice and smiled patiently upon him when he was fretful! Perhaps she was too indulgent, and the maternal laxness did something towards the spoiling of the child for the manhood that was to follow. But no matter, let the golfer always be kind and well disposed to his mother links.

[THE SUNNY SEASON]

I

One hears it said sometimes by versatile and thorough-going sportsmen, that of all the sweet sensations to be discovered and enjoyed occasionally in the whole world of sport, the hitting of a perfect tee shot is one of the best, one of the only two or three best. These men are probably right, for the hitting of a really spanking ball from the tee, when one feels the complete absence of a grating or a jerking anywhere in the system, showing that the whole of the most complicated movement has worked round the centre with the accuracy of a watch, and that every ounce of available power has thus been put into the drive to the greatest advantage—this is a fine thing to feel, and the pity is that the joy of it is so fleeting, and that the memory of it has entirely gone a few minutes later when some succeeding shot has not been quite so good.

But is there not another feeling which comes to a man in the game sometimes which is even more uplifting, much more so? It lasts longer, and it is fuller, richer. The man is then transformed, etherealised; he is no longer a thing of this crawling, walking world; and he is not a mere man on the links as he used to be, happy, indeed, for the most part, but very human, with many adversities to encounter, as generally in this world. The man is raised for a while to the higher state, and his golfing soul floats in Valhalla when he is suddenly permitted to play many holes in succession better than he had ever played holes before—everything perfect, and a little more than perfect, which means fortunate all the way from the tee to the flag. It is one of those days which have been dreamt about and regarded as impossible, when the marvellous coincidence has occurred of the man being “on” everything at the same time, and of everything going right when he was thus on them. Aforetime it has been that when he was on six things a seventh has led him astray, and there has always been a seventh at least, if not another too. The factor of evil could never be cancelled. But this time it is, and it is as if the gods, smiling benevolently on the lucky and successful player, determine that he shall be happy to the utmost, and therefore they allow him all the good fortune that is theirs to give. The most perfect balls are driven from the tee, the most impossible carries are accomplished; there is a delightful crispness about the approaches, and the six-feet putts are holed with precision and confidence; while here and there, to the utter demoralisation of the arch enemy par, to say nothing of the poor man who is the human victim of it all, the long putts go down as well.

It is, perhaps, given to most players to be stirred with this indescribable joy once or twice in their lives—seldom more than that. It is not until three or four holes have been played that the full realisation of what is happening comes to the favoured player, and it is then that he is rapidly etherealised. His joy may last for another four or five holes; it will seldom endure a round. I have seen men when they have been in this state and under this most extraordinary influence, and they have not then been as they are at other times. Their inward ecstasy shines outside them. There is a curious nervous smile on their faces, and their eyes gleam. Their steps are short and hurried. They seldom speak, and when they do there is a touch of incoherency in their remarks. It is best that they should not be spoken to. They are suffering from a curious dementia of exaltation. They have help from Olympus, and history is being made. When I have seen it done I have once or twice made a close study of the behaviour of the man, and I know that it is as I have written. One of the most memorable occasions on which I witnessed this super-exaltation was during an Open Championship at Sandwich, when records were being made, and when at last a fine amateur player seemed to set out towards the making of one more. Hole after hole was played with that combination of perfection and fortune, and at last the man fell under the influence, and you could see it in possession of him as he went tripping along. You knew that, phlegmatic as a golfer must be who aspires to the greatest achievements, and as this one often was even in the hour of crisis, his heart was now beginning to beat. Soon afterwards it was all over; there was an amazing catastrophe on a fiery putting green and four or five putts were needed there. Three years later I saw the same man with the exaltation in him again at Muirfield, when he went through to a great achievement. I shall not forget the look of that man when he was doing these things. It is a chilly descent when the spell is broken, and it is all earth and clay again, but in the reaction there is no suffering. A happy reason comes to the rescue of the throbbing player, and he is reminded that such things are not to be for always, lest golf should not be what it is.

II

When the sun shines the putting greens get keen. There is an old saying that driving is an art, iron play a science, and putting is the devil. Just that—the devil. I agree entirely, and I have ascertained that the greatest exponents of the game are in sympathy with the suggestion.

Well may the writers of text-books of the game declare, when they come to the chapter on putting, that there is really nothing to say, and that they must leave the reader to find out the whole business by instinct and practice, as there are no rules to be laid down for his guidance. What would be the use of their pretending that they can really teach putting when, if they had to hole an eight-feet putt for a championship, the odds would be slightly against them? In June 1905, while I was smoking my pipe on the top of the bank on the far side of the home green at St. Andrews, I was being provided at intervals of no great length with much food for reflection and philosophy, better than which no man who ever talks or writes of golf could wish for. The Open Championship was being played for, and there duly came along Vardon, Braid, Taylor, and Herd, all more or less favourites for the event in progress, and it is a real fact that of these four men three of them missed putts at this home hole of less than a yard. I think the average length was about eighteen inches; one of them was not more than a foot, and the way in which the ball was worked round to the far side of the hole without going in was wonderful—quite wonderful. It will be noticed that I give four names and mention only three misses. This is because even the greatest players are sometimes very tender on this subject of missing short putts, and to spare them any annoyance I do not name the particular individuals who failed. It is enough that one of them, and one only, did not.