When the ball is behind a bank, or when for any reason it is wanted to rise suddenly to a fair height and pull up abruptly on touching the ground, the cut stroke is the one for the player to use. This stroke is very difficult to play well, but it is well worth cultivating. It is invaluable on some links, and no golfer is worthy to be reckoned a first-class player until she has become thoroughly proficient in it. A great deal can be learned about the cut stroke by watching professionals play. Most of them use it to a greater or less extent in all their short pitch approaches. The club is taken out rather to the right, and brought in again somewhat across the ball at the moment of hitting, and then finishes to the left. At the same time it must cut well under the ball. A common mistake is to let the arms go too far away from the body, the swing thus becoming jerky and unbalanced. Mr. Darwin suggests for the mitigating of this tendency that the stance should be very open, and that the player should turn the face of her club slightly out to the right. This attitude will make it easy and natural to take the club out to the right, and so the cross-cutting action will follow automatically with very little deliberate effort. A method which I have found efficacious in my own play, but which is so unorthodox that I can only offer it as a tentative suggestion, is to face the club rather down on the ball before making the shot. I cannot explain why this should be helpful, and I do not think I ever saw any one else use the same method, but to me undoubtedly it is by far the easiest way of playing a cut stroke. There is one very important point to remember about this shot, and that is that no matter how the preliminaries of the stroke are made, the swing itself must be quick and firm. A wavering uncertain motion of the club will never effect the desired result. People vary very much in their methods of approaching. Some use a mashie up to the very edge of the green, others prefer to run the ball up with an iron or wooden putter. The little chip-shots played from within a short distance of the hole are usually made largely with the wrists. Miss M. A. Graham plays these shots beautifully. It is delightful to watch her style of approaching. Whether a divot is taken with these shots, or whether the ball is picked up clean, depends on the nature of the lie. With an indifferent lie the former plan is adopted, with a good lie, the latter. The ball can be made to pitch and run, or to pitch right up to the hole and drop dead, as the player desires. Sometimes one shot is more suitable, sometimes the other. The pitch and run is accomplished by a miniature edition of the swing for an ordinary long mashie shot, the pitch and drop dead by the cut-stroke method. Approaching is a branch of golf which can be brought to a very high standard of excellence. A finished golfer should be able to lay her ball within possible holing distance every time she makes an approach from within fifty or sixty yards of the green. Sometimes, of course, she will get the ball quite close, occasionally she will even hole out, but only under very exceptional circumstances should she fail to make the ball stay within five or six yards of the pin. Practice and practice only will achieve this, and the beginner should always have this standard in view, and must concentrate all her energies to the attaining of it.

The most deadly enemy to good mashie play is that dreadful evil which goes by the name of socketing.

SHOWING HOW BYE SHOULD BE KEPT ON GROUND AFTER BALL IS HIT IN AN APPROACH.

[To face p. 325.

Socketing is enough to make women weep and strong men tear their hair. It is a perfectly maddening disease. No words are too strong to paint its horrors. It sometimes comes from want of practice, sometimes from forcing, sometimes from taking the eye off the ball, sometimes from no apparent cause at all, but whenever it comes it reduces the player to the last degree of desperation. And when one fit is cured, the uneasy sensation is left that another may be in prospect, and so the player finds it very hard to recover her confidence. Some people carry a socketless mashie in their bag, to which they have recourse when the first symptoms of the disease appear, but this is merely a 'sop to Cerberus,' and it is much more satisfactory to try to get at the root of the evil and to overcome it.

The most ordinary faults which lead to socketing are that the player is taking her club back too fast, or that she is taking her eye off the ball. But it may also be that the club is being taken too far out to the right and brought down too much to the left, so that the hands are allowed to come forward too quickly. To cure this latter fault the arms should be kept well in to the body, the left elbow in particular remaining close to the side, and great care should be exercised to see that the wrists are turning correctly. The keeping of the wrists and arms stiff may be helpful in curing socketing, as the malady occasionally comes from a too loose use of the wrists. Miss C. Leitch in her book on golf presents the following infallible cure to her readers: 'Put a folded handkerchief under your left arm-pit, and you will not socket if the handkerchief remains there throughout the shot. The cure, of course, does not get a fair trial if you are standing too near your ball or falling forward on to it, because your weight is too much on your toes.'