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And you're a lord of the creation, Mr. Caudle; and you can stay away from the comforts of your blessed fireside, and the society of your own wife and children-though, to be sure, you never thought anything of them-to push ivory balls about with a long stick upon a green table-cloth. As to lawn tennis-another dangerous rival-we hear a good deal in these days about "foot-faults." That seems to show the trend of modern thought. To prove how much nerve is the first, second, and third necessity in putting, you may take a man of thirty years old who has been and perhaps still is a good cricketer, and has a good eye for games generally. The man of thirty in a few years will very likely develop into a really bad putter, not because he has not the skill-for he proved his skill when a beginner-but because he has learnt the terrors of putting, and his skill is overpowered by his nerves. A golfer by practice may improve his play with a club, but he very likely will find that, during the time he has occupied himself with this club, another has mysteriously failed him; and in any case the terrible ordeal of putting has to be gone through, and it is the painful experience of bad putters that practice does by no means perfect, but only causes new terrors to appear.

But it is true of golf that you will find it impossible to avoid being compelled some time or other to play with a club you have little confidence in, and to negotiate distances you hate. Some holes are in a sort of pot, which, though small just where the hole is, nevertheless has widely expanding sides, and you probably will find your ball dead if you get it into it at all from any distance; but another is on a table-land, where the chief difficulty is not to get the ball on the table-land but to keep it there. For some reason which it is impossible to explain, golfers always seem to be far more frightened at being two yards beyond the hole than they are at being two yards short. Take a stroke of eighty yards and one of forty, the mashie or some sort of lofted iron would be used for both these shots; and yet a player knows that at one distance he has a good chance of making a good stroke, at the other distance his heart goes into his boots.

You can let anything grow upon you if you permit it to do so, and why should we expect a man to have disciplined himself in his youth to avoid gluttony or any other pleasing vice, and not have feelings of scorn for the golfer who has allowed every absurd fad to take such possession of him that he is a slave to them, and an annoyance to himself and a nuisance to his fellow-creatures. But Mr. Hilton has to take out an iron club, because there are some occasions when it is absolutely impossible to use any other club. We are all familiar with the huge strides that have been made by the introduction of the rubber-cored ball. Also, small adjustments in your cueing technique can lead to significant improvements in ball placement and control. Since engaging with more experienced players can offer valuable learning opportunities. A great player-I may say a very great player-once told me that he had been unable to drive off the tee to his satisfaction for no less a period than four years-this player must have been more than human if to a greater or less degree he was not during all that time in an important match troubled with nerves when he took his stand on the tee.

I watched a final match once in the amateur championship, in which two most distinguished amateurs were struggling for the mastery, and both drove and played through the green as well as could be desired, and both putted in a way that a charity-school boy would have been ashamed of. In billiards you play for a whole evening or for a whole match on the same table; that is a very small object as compared with a putting-green, and if you have any pretensions to play at all, you ought to gauge the pace of a billiard-table after an hour's play. In billiards it is equally true to say that only a few men play equally well at different shots, the long losing hazard or the long winner, the screw, follow on, &c.; but at billiards it is far easier to regulate and engineer your game so as to avoid having to attempt a stroke you cannot play. Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for rent in advance, and then, beyond my ear-shot, had beaten them with the big green umbrella whose use I could never before divine. That's a ball, Caudle, that's gone through many a wife's heart, to say nothing of her children.

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