Insensibly, perhaps, but none the less surely, you drift into habits and mannerisms which you will find it impossible to shake off. They will cling to you as closely as Sinbad's old man of the sea. The majority of these habits, too, will be bad ones; it will be impossible to entirely eradicate them, and the result will be that before you have fairly launched yourself upon the pursuit of the game you will have practically ruined your chances of becoming proficient.

This is the point that I desire to drive home as forcibly as lays within my power. The idea of self-tuition is an altogether impossible one, and in order to learn the game thoroughly the services of a competent instructor must be secured and his advice literally followed out to the letter.

After bad habits have been acquired, the trail of the serpent is over the whole of the play, and the task of the tutor is rendered trebly difficult. He is not faced by one desperately bad stroke or mistaken knack of doing a thing ; the faults now are many their name is legion, and all the tutor can fairly hope to do in the long run is to modify them and blend them with the real thing as far as he is able.

The instructor may try and try; he may approach his task from various standpoints, but if a man has once fallen into a bad style, the best the tutor can fairly hope to do is, as I have already said, to modify it to some extent. Even then, should he apparently succeed, it is apt to crop up when least expected, so my decided advice to a beginner is, Don't attempt to teach yourself - such a thing is an impossibility - but go to a competent instructor and secure a series of lessons. There is no great and ready road to excellence in golf, but some roads are easier than others.

Coming back to the subject of actual instruction. After a fair amount of proficiency has been acquired in the use of the cleek, iron, and mashie, we have the difficulty of the putting to surmount. And here I may say at once it is an absolute impossibility to teach a man how to putt.

Even many of the leading professionals are weak in this department of the game. Do you think they would not improve themselves in this particular stroke were such a thing within the range of possibility? Certainly they would. The fact is, that in putting, more than in aught else, a very special aptitude is necessary. A good eye and a faculty for gauging distances correctly is a great help, indeed, quite a necessity, as also is judgment with regard to the requisite power to put behind the ball. Unfortunately, these are things that cannot be taught, they must come naturally, or not at all.

All that is possible for the instructor to do is to discover what kind of a putting style his pupil is possessed of, offer him useful hints, and his ultimate measure of success is then solely in his own hands.

It is easy to tell a pupil how he must needs hold his clubs in driving or playing an iron shot, but in putting there is hardly such a necessity. The diversity of styles accounts for this, and in this particular kind of stroke a man must be content to rely upon his own adaptability alone.

In teaching the game right through, what an instructor has to do is this: he must discover his man's particular kind of style, and that done, he must develop it or graft a better one upon it. As for teaching how the more difficult shots are to be played, well, that is a matter that must of necessity be left to the purely practical side of instruction.

A man may play a round, and no matter whether it be the result of good luck or good judgment, he may not find himself in many difficulties. If he does find himself in an awkward predicament he must use his brain, think the situation over, and get out of it in the best manner he is capable of Conditions vary so much that it is impossible to say what must be done; strokes must be played to suit the case, for accidents will happen to the best of us.

Probably the most difficult shot that would fall to the lot of any player would be that rendered necessary by his getting into a hazard, or finding it necessary to recover from the result of a bad stroke. How to accomplish it, as can be readily understood, may be shown in actual practice upon the links, but it cannot be explained in bare black and white. All that can be done is to advise the pupil as he is playing, and to allow him to practise getting into position again, and so prepare himself for anything he is likely to encounter when playing entirely unsupported and with nothing but his own knowledge to rely upon.

Bunkered. After having just struck Ball p. S4.

A great deal has been written and said in the various text-books concerning the position a man must stand in when he is playing a stroke. Diagrams have been pressed into service to show what should be attempted, and so on.

But the great diversity of opinion is a very curious feature of this particular piece of advice. Some golfers, leading amateurs and professionals alike, will decide that they must, and do, play off the right foot, and others, who stand equally as high in reputation, play off the left.

The fundamental idea in this dissimilarity of style is the same, although in this instance again it would be a matter of extreme difficulty to lay down any fixity of ruling that would bear directly upon it.

Personally speaking, I play off the right foot, and have always done so. Why this should be the case I cannot say; all I know is that it came quite naturally for me to do so.

Mr. Horace Hutchinson, on the other hand, declares that the correct way is to play off the left leg, although I can say with perfect safety that nearly every first-class professional golfer plays more or less off the right foot. This is, however, only a question of style and the effect of it upon a man's play.

But there is the question of weather to be considered in this matter of the position taken up when actually playing. Rough weather naturally affects some golfers to a far greater degree than it does others, and in my own opinion, if you play off the right foot, you secure an advantage. You apparently have a greater amount of command over the ball, but why this should be the case I am unable to say. Possibly it may be that you strike the ball in a different way, although I think the secret is that in playing from the right foot you secure a far greater amount of leverage, which gives additional power to the stroke. The meaning of this could well be illustrated in actual play, but it is difficult to otherwise convey it.

As against the left-leg theory, the case of Mr. John Ball might be taken as a powerful argument. Mr. Ball is one of the finest exponents of the game, but he plays off the right. He is a grand golfer when the weather is at its roughest; and the same may be said of Mr. H. H. Hilton, who also is inclined to play off the right leg.

Mr. Ball and Mr. Hilton do not play in the same style; but for the purpose of illustrating what I mean, we will suppose they are both handling the club in a very high wind - a fair test of the powers of anyone.

Mr. Ball, as he makes his stroke, appears to play across the current of the wind, and Mr. Hilton in a manner calculated to secure any assistance possible from the breeze that may be blowing at the time. That is the most simple way by which I am enabled to describe their respective styles, unless I descend to the use of technicalities, and I have no intention of doing that in the course of this chapter.

The nicer points of the strokes, however, have never been looked at from a purely professional point of view, and although the finished player may obtain a longer carry (I say "may" advisedly) for his ball by playing off the left leg, I hold that this is more than counterbalanced by the additional command over the ball secured by playing off the right foot

By the use of the word "carry" in the previous paragraph I need hardly explain that I am referring to the distance covered through the air before the ball touches the ground.

This effect cannot be gained by intentionally imparting any bias or spin to the ball by the action of striking it. Upon the billiard table a skilful player is able to deflect the course of the cue ball by the side or bias he imparts in playing it. This cannot be done in golf, for the smallest degree of "cut" imparted from the head of the club tends to stop its proper progress.

If a ball turns and twists in a reverse direction while describing a curve through the air, it has not been truly hit. But in choosing the lesser of two evils, a pulled ball is to be preferred to a sliced one, owing to the greater amount of run imparted to it

Still, it is not advisable, neither do I look upon it as being golf in the truest sense of the word, for the knack of pulling or slicing to be cultivated, as I am afraid it is by a great many players. No compromise should be made with a fault.

FULL DRIVE FINISH OF SWING FRONT VIEW.