When the late Mr. F. G. Tait was presented to the Czar at Balmoral, the two talked about golf, and the then amateur champion told how he had 'taken it seriously when he was eight years old.' To-day there are thousands of boys and girls beginning the game at eight years old, thus enjoying advantages that were denied to their parents, and the question arises how seriously they are to take it. No one wants them to be priggishly solemn over the game, but they may as well learn to play as skilfully as they can, and there is some duty owing to them in the matter.

Children may very easily be driven too hard. I heard the other day of a too zealous father who took his whole flock to a famous course for the summer with a view to their golfing education, and they grew with one accord so tired of the game that they flew perversely to lawn-tennis. If left reasonably to themselves children do not lack enthusiasm. I can look back to my own golfing beginnings at about the age of eight at Felixstowe. I see a small creature in a flannel shirt, brown holland shorts and bare legs, burned to an excruciating redness by the sun, dodging in and out between the grown-up couples, a little outlaw to be ruthlessly passed and driven into. I can still hear the crack of the great Willie Fernie's ball against the black board of a bunker in which I was delving, when I must have come very near to death. There was one short hole, the second or Gate hole, close to the Martello tower, which I used to play over and over again, dashing back to the tee to start again whenever there was a gap between the grown-up players. There are to-day hundreds of little boys just as keen and just as blissfully un-selfconscious about getting in the way. They will flog their way round the whole eighteen holes by themselves, taking over three hours in the process, yielding when they must to those who would pass them, and driving cheerfully into them as soon as they have got twenty yards ahead.

Granted the keenness, the question is how to direct it into the wisest channels. First come the clubs. It is easiest and cheapest to give a child a cast-off club of our own cut down, but it is not always best. A man's club, however shortened, and especially an iron club, is nearly always too heavy for a child to wield. The child cannot swing the club, but has to heave it up like a rifle in so many motions and gets into a disjointed and laborious style. It is wiser to get the clubs made by a professional. There need not be many of them. As far as the child's fun is concerned, three are ample: a wooden club with an encouraging measure of loft upon the face, a medium iron, and a mashie. For its future well-being, however, a fourth should certainly be added, namely, a putter. It is, I think, generally recognised that the average professional is, judged by his standard of skill in all other strokes, not a very good putter. I have always thought that this was due to the fact that in his caddie days he had very few clubs, and almost certainly no putter. He therefore did his putting with an iron or cleek and acquired a method not suited to the orthodox putter. With a flat-lying and lofted club a boy may learn to pitch or cut or 'jab ' the ball into the hole, but not to roll it smoothly and truly. I know that in my own case I used as a boy to putt with a lofting iron and thus got into a habit of crouching low, gripping the shaft in the neighbourhood of the head and dragging the ball towards the hole. It has beset me at intervals ever since, to the great detriment of my putting, and only when the greens are quite appallingly bad have I found any compensating advantages in the accomplishment. Duncan confirms this theory, as I was interested to find from a paper he wrote on putting some years back. When the professional gets his putter, says Duncan, 'he has to start learning to putt all over again. . . . He seldom succeeds in mastering the more upright club, and some fifty per cent, of the professionals persist in using a putting cleek which is far too fiat.' Let the child therefore have a proper putter. Here a cast-off will do very well, and there must be few fathers who have not in a cupboard at least one derelict putter which they once hopefully deemed a magic wand.

To the late beginner, all stiff and ungainly as he is, it is exasperating to observe how quickly and easily a child can learn to swing a club. Put a model before his eyes (I will assume a boy for the purposes of the argument), and he will produce a passable imitation in less than no time. If the model is a player with a sound style, there can be no education so good. With very little pressing the boy will follow the greatest local player round the course, watching his every movement with pathetic dog-like eyes of admiration. If his hero is a really fine player the boy is in luck : he should be encouraged to watch all he can. But some discrimination is necessary, for there are local heroes who are not very good golfers and have thoroughly vicious styles. The parent must be careful lest he himself be imitated by his too dutiful offspring. There are many model fathers who are not model golfers. I have seen small boys plunging down the golfing road to ruin by copying their fathers' almost prohibitive methods, and have wondered whether it would be an act of disloyalty, an offence against the trade-union spirit amongst parents, to warn them. This monkeyish facility of the boy has its perils as well as its merits. He may so easily acquire a style that is fair enough to outward view, with a slap-dash swashbuckling air to it, and yet be radically unsound. Once he has got it he may never quite free himself of it again, and so all his life be subject to sudden breakdowns and the ensuing agonies of style-hunting.

I may illustrate this point by personal and painful reminiscences. When I was about ten, and so a golfer of some two years' standing, I was one day off my infantile game and the professional was asked to look at my swing. He looked and said that there was nothing much the matter except that at the top of the swing I bent my knees rather too much. No doubt he was right, and the horrid proof of it is this, that though at this present day I am subject to many superficially different diseases at golf, yet the cause of them all is the same, a tendency to too loose and florid a movement of the knees, which sends my whole body sprawling. I rid myself of it for a while, but it is always lying in wait for me. In a certain camp in Macedonia we had some men of an Egyptian Labour Corps, and attached to them an interpreter. He had one stock phrase to describe general debility. 'This man,'he said, 'bends at the kneels.' Well, that is my stock disease-I bend at the kneels; and though I was warned against it at ten, I shall suffer from it at eighty. I suppose I was not caught early or warned impressively enough.