I said that Braid seemed to take the game as part of his day's work. So he does, but I should add that it is with the never-failing zest and interest that a good workman always takes in his work. I have never seen any one so clearly determined not for one moment to allow himself to grow bored or careless. Play with or against him in the mildest of after-lunch foursomes, and let him be five up with six to play. He will still walk the whole length of a long putt with that slow, swinging stride to look at the line from the hole, and he will try as hard to lay the ball dead as if his life depended on it. A very charming lady once played a foursome at Walton Heath with Braid for a partner. Time after time she toppled the ball a few yards with her beautiful new clubs, and time after time Braid, out of all sorts of lies, sent the ball hurtling enormous distances down the course. At last with her tee shot to the eleventh hole she was unlucky, and the ball at the end of its brief journey finished in a small bush. Braid surveyed it carefully, where it nestled among the roots of the bush 'looking,' as one who was present described it, 'like a wren's egg.' Then taking his heaviest niblick he demolished the bush and sent the ball some thirty yards. It was a really prodigious feat, but his partner had never seen him hit such a short distance before. 'Well, Mr. Braid,' she said with an engaging smile, 'it is a comfort to see that even you can miss a shot sometimes.'

Braid can miss a shot sometimes, though he did not miss that one, and when he does the ball has a habit of going to very curious places. Vardon's very rare bad shot is hardly ever destructive: his swing seems too true and easy to permit anything very dreadful to happen to him. Braid's crooked shot is conceived on a bolder and more glorious scale. It is often only his amazing powers of recovery that prevent it from being very destructive indeed. It is this very occasional but magnificent aberration that helps to make him a player of vivid contrasts. His whole manner of playing the game, when he is not actually making a stroke, is so sedate and careful -his whole manner of hitting so full of divine fury. Taylor clearly 'means wenom.' He looks as if he intended to hurt the ball, but Braid looks as if he intended to lash it off the face of the earth, to kill it outright. His very waggle is menacing : there is a little additional shake of the club-head which warns us that something terrific is coming and makes us cower involuntarily. And then the moment it is all over he relapses almost into benignity.

We cannot separate these great three from Sandy Herd, who has fought them so often and so hard, and will be divided from them in golfing history by so small a gap. The gap would have been smaller still, perhaps there would be none at all, if Herd had been able to bear prosperity as well as he does adversity. There is no more courageous or dour fighter. It is only sometimes when he stands 'a tip-toe on the highest point of being,'the palm of victory almost in his grasp, that he just fails. He seems now and again unable to wait for the round to finish itself out and allow victory to come surely if slowly: he wants to hurry on the great moment and then sometimes it has delayed to come altogether. There is no more transparently sincere player. There is no mask upon his face : we know when he is sorry and when he is glad and when he is excited; never when he is frightened, for he is as brave as a lion. To see him, when he has just pulled a hard fight out of the fire, take out his pipe, light it and puff at it, is one of the pleasantest sights in all golf. It makes one for the moment feel as contented as if one had won the match oneself.

If there is no more straightforward golfer, so, in a sense, is there no one more dramatic. His many waggles, so full of purpose, work one up to an acute state of expectancy : the gesticulations of his club, after the ball has gone on its way, impart to us much of his own anxiety as to its fate. Herd, though he may not know it, is furnishing, as he urges on his sluggard ball towards the hole, material of intense interest to the anthropologist by 'indulging in an interesting form of primitive ritual.'

He is trying to make the ball reach the hole by means of 'sympathetic magic,'which is, as I have been informed by a lady of European reputation, 'in its ultimate analysis an utterance, a discharge of emotion and longing.' She has pointed out that the watcher of a lawn-tennis match does 'in sheer sympathy the thing he wants done . . . raising an unoccupied leg to help the suspended ball over the net.' There is no doubt what Sandy Herd wants done when he waves his club at the ball. The only wonder is that there is ever found a ball with the hardihood to disobey him. And now at fifty-two, or is it fifty-three, years old he is as keen and as full of cheerful fight as ever-a great golfer who might possibly have been a greater, but could not have been a more interesting one.

There are other famous professionals and a good deal to say about them, but my procession of great golfers follows no definite rules and there come now into my mind some famous amateurs. At the present moment our amateur golf is in a rather curious and chaotic state. One might almost choose a team of twenty or even thirty, put them in order and spin a coin to decide which should be the top of the list and which the bottom. There are many who hit the ball beautifully for a while, but those who are consistently better than their fellows it is hard to name. It used not to be so. One reason is of course that to-day there are many more golfers, but apart from that there are not for the time being any unquestionably outstanding figures. When I first began to take a juvenile interest in golf there were three very great names, and two more only a little less awe-inspiring. The three were Mr. John Ball (I am not sure if he was then tertius or junior), Mr. Horace Hutchinson, and Mr. J. E. Laidlay, and the other two were Mr. Leslie Balfour and Mr. Mure Fergusson. A little later came Mr. Hilton and the late Mr. F. G. Tait, and these two seemed gradually to oust Mr. Hutchinson and Mr. Laidlay, and join Mr. Ball as the persons of a great trinity. Again a little later-and I come now to my own contemporaries-there arrived the late Mr. Jack Graham and Mr. Maxwell. There have been other fine players, some of them no doubt quite as good as one or two of those I have mentioned : yet for one reason or other, perhaps because they were born at the wrong time, they seem to me never to have been surrounded by quite the same exclusive glamour. Two out of my nine never won a championship, but they will always be for me the high gods among amateurs. Everybody else, whatever he may do, will have something earthly and human about him. So I shall follow my own bent and take my sacred nine in a body.