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

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

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