'I knew I should get you out,' said a famous and insidious old slow bowler to a young batsman.

'Yes,' said the batsman, ' but I got eighty runs first.'

So here, too, it is a question of counting the cost. The right twiddle will doubtless be found in time, but the searcher will often have lost many half-crowns before he finds it. If he had proceeded on saner and larger lines he would have made a much quicker and also a more permanent recovery.

This is a point to be remembered not only when we are playing badly, but when, if so blessed a circumstance ever occur, we are playing well. On those happy days when the ball flies so sweetly and easily away, it is of course foolish to note our symptoms too closely. If we do that, we shall soon be trying not to hit the ball far and sure, but to hit it exactly as we hit the one before, and this way lies one of the most facile descents to perdition with which I am acquainted. But if we can, without thinking too much about it, note some particular good quality - on a large scale - which is now present and is too often absent, we may acquire a valuable store of knowledge. Some abstruse kink of the little finger may have started us on our course of improvement, by giving us confidence. But it was the confidence and not the little finger that smoothed out our swing for us and made it slower; that kept the body still and let the arms follow through. Those are the things we ought to notice, and the little finger, having served its purpose, should be instantly cast aside with the blackest ingratitude.

And now, to go back to our search for faults, it is often as well to take another opinion besides our own, if a competent one can be obtained. Sometimes we know perfectly well what we are doing wrongly, and the whole difficulty is to do it rightly, but at other times we may feel fairly sure and yet be very glad of a confirmation. There are times, moreover, when we are at our wits' end, being only conscious of missing the ball with an extreme feeling of discomfort. Here the external observer will be most valuable, and there is this especially to be said for him; he will only see the big general faults, and will not lead us on a futile twiddle-hunt because, not being able to feel our most intimate sensations, he will be perfectly unconscious of fifty minor things that we imagine ourselves to be doing.

Having by our own intelligence or that of others discovered our faults, what are we to do next? The most delightfully simple, and generally the best course, is merely to try to refrain from doing the things that we ought not to do. Thus, we are taking up the club too fast or too straight: what we have to do is to take it up slowly or with a flatter sweep. So far so good, but there are faults more difficult to deal with. Suppose, for instance, that we are putting our body too soon into the downward swing, and so letting body and hands go through before the club. The obvious prescription is simply to hold the body back, but in this case it is often a little too obvious and of no real service. Then we have to cast about for some other cure, and some two or three may suggest themselves, all about equally hopeful. When this happens, it is always worth inquiring whether we have in fact run the fault to earth, if such a metaphor is allowable. Have we really burrowed quite deep enough? It is quite likely that we have not, and we must go deeper still in order, if possible, to find some simpler and more fundamental fault, which is in truth the cause, and for which there is but one remedy. There generally is such a fault if we can only find it, and, whatever the remedy ultimately decided upon, that remedy should always be given a reasonably long trial. It is futile to abandon it merely because the first shot or two do not show a marvellous improvement. There is always likely to be some discomfort at first, but the patient must give the cure a fair chance, and if he tries to keep an open mind he will soon find out if he is on the right track. It is one of the advantages of having our own diagnosis confirmed by a competent observer that we are then the more inclined to give this fair chance, and not abandon the remedy at once with a despairing cry of ' That's no good.'

I have just two more pieces of general advice. The first is that the golfer should start afresh with each fresh illness. He should consider his lamentable case de novo and not hark back, without taking thought, to some cure that proved effective in one of his previous seizures. 'so-and-so told me to put my right foot further back, and I drove magnificently,' says many an unthinking person, to whom I would reply, 'Yes, my dear sir, but it is likely that he said that because you were then standing with your right foot too far forward. At this present moment you are standing with the left foot forward as if about to hit to square leg.'

The second piece of advice is not to go on trying remedies for ever. If a man cannot within a reasonable time discover that he is doing any one definite thing wrong, and those who know his game cannot discover it either, then it is clear that his is after all a case for general treatment, and that he had better eliminate from his mind everything save those two essentials, the club and the ball. When this fails too, it is sometimes wise to give up the game for a while and enjoy complete repose. In that case it is really to be complete repose, and there is to be no swinging privily in the front hall or pitching into well-padded armchairs. Faults may sometimes disappear and the golfer be himself again when he emerges from retirement, but as a rule it is otherwise, and the fault is too deeply rooted to be so easily driven out. Whether we are generally stale and jaded with too much golf, or whether we have acquired some particular and atrocious habit, the best cure is the most painful, to go on manfully plodding through despair and darkness. The ray of light will surely come in time.