If-and it is very doubtful-there is any one who can outdrive Mitchell, it is Edward Ray. Ray is so large and hits so hard, smokes so many pipes and looks so casual over it all, that he gives the impression of a happy-go-lucky golfer; but in this appearances are deceptive. He has an admirable power of taking the rough with the smooth and, just because he hits so far, the rough is for him apt to be very rough indeed ; but I think he tries as hard as anybody to keep on the smooth and, whatever he once did, he now succeeds extremely often. If Ray does not strike one as pre-eminently an artist, he is an extraordinarily efficient workman. Moreover, there is a good deal of concealed art in those mountainous approaches of his, played so accurately with a graduated armoury of niblicks. Perhaps some onlookers fancy that if they were only as strong as Ray, approaching would lose most of its terrors, since it would be so easy just to bang the ball up with a niblick, but they would soon find out they were wrong. Ray is a natural player who has stuck to his own very individual style. That does not mean that he does not know plenty about it and about other people's style as well.

Ray with his pipe, and his hat on the back of his head, looks the part of the good-natured giant to perfection. Another big, strong man, Arnaud Massy, looks it too, but in his case there is an added something of fine, swashbuckling fierceness. To be seen at his best, both as a golfer and a picturesque personage, Massy must be studied in a wind. He was bred in a home of the winds, Biarritz, and before one Championship he expressed the wish that it would blow hard enough to blow down every tree in Sandwich. The picture I have of him in my mind's eye is always the same. He is standing on a little knoll, with his big square shoulders well back, at once revelling in the wind and defying it. His Open Championship in 1907 was won in windy weather on that very windy course, Hoylake, and when he tied for first place at Sandwich four years later, ultimately to lose to Vardon on playing off, there was a fine strong breeze blowing. Massy has twice finished top of the list in an Open Championship, and no one was surprised at his doing so; but he does not finish second or third. With him it seems to be a case of 'Aut Caesar aut nullus.' He goes out for victory or nothing, and if it is only a question whether he finishes a place or two higher up or lower down, with no chance of the first place at all, I do not think he cares very much about the matter. There is something of the amateur about him rather than of the professional who always compels himself to go on trying. No man in the world can try harder than Massy when he means to: to see him settle down to study a putt is a lesson in fierce concentration. On the other hand, when he does not greatly care the fact is equally obvious. There is no more individual player than Massy. The famous 'pig's-tail' twiddle at the top of his swing, the inward turn of the left heel which outrages all orthodox teaching, the long and rather abrupt lift of the club in playing mashie shots, the delicate fingering of his putter-these things are conspicuously his own. He is a great and a fascinating golfer, and when 1 spoke of his deeds in our Open Championship I did not forget that he had won several times the Championship of his own France, and that against most of the quality if not all the quantity of British professionals.

Another fine player who has once won the Open Championship, and been near it once or twice besides, is Jack White. He is a golfer to be admired for several reasons, but particularly for a most lovable optimism, an undying keenness for the game. If he is off his game he is soon going to be on it again, and he has for ever got a new club or a new manner of swinging an old one, a cure or a dodge or a recipe which is going to make the rest of life a pure joy for himself or his pupils. Some of this imperishable enthusiasm must, I suspect, be a family trait, for it belongs to the ever-youthful Ben Sayers who is his uncle. If both these two live to be a hundred it is tolerably certain that on the memorable birthday, when he is being overwhelmed with congratulations and besieged by interviewers, each one of them will be working out some new theory of hitting a golf ball. Jack White has had in rather a marked degree his ups and downs in golf, but he has always pegged away cheerfully and hopefully and, if ever the other shots forsake him, he always humps his back, sinks his nose down over the ball, and taps his putts into the hole. A player of rather complex methods, he has never quite succeeded in evolving for himself the simple and direct style in the long shots, which is such a stand-by for some of his rivals, but as regards other people he has a remarkable talent for finding out what is right and what is wrong. There are several good amateur players who, when off their game, go to take a course of Jack White with the same confidence with which they would go for a course at Bath or Harrogate for the gout.

It is getting painfully clear to me that this account of famous players might be protracted to infinity. There are so many of them. To write down a list of fine professional players of to-day would need a page. Rowland Jones, a really beautiful golfer who has only lacked something of health and strength ; Tom Williamson, the unfailingly steady, an ideal foursome partner ; Lawrence Ayton, Edgar, and Mayo, now all gone to America, and Tom Vardon too, whom Sandwich has never ceased to mourn ; the young bloods Havers and Allis-there is no end of them. Of an older generation I am not enough of a Scotsman to do justice to Andrew Kirkaldy, Ben Sayers, and Willie Park. There is one English professional, however, whom I cannot leave out and that is James Sherlock, who learned to be a very fine player on one of the worst courses in Europe, Hinksey, and was the valued friend and guide of generations of Oxford golfers. Sherlock is a golfer who looks as if he had reduced the game to its elements. Mr. Croome once acutely described him as having 'no style, only method.' He takes hold of the club in the simplest possible way and then stands up and hits the ball. He hits it a good long way, and he declares that he hits it as hard as he can. Probably this is quite true, and it is part of his skill and wisdom that, recognising the limitations of his strength, he never tries to hit it too hard. There is no player whom it would be so impossible to tempt into trying for something that he felt to be beyond his powers: no one who so consistently cuts his coat according to his cloth. He is a thoroughly original thinker about golf, and I have not forgotten the rating he gave me, no doubt well deserved, for writing what I believed to be a harmless, orthodox, and conventional description of the running-up shot.