If Mr. Laidlay is ever canonised he will certainly be represented on a stained-glass window with a little light lofted putting cleek, much worn by cleaning, in his hand, and on the scroll underneath it will be written, 'I must trust to a pitch and a putt.'

In his comparatively old age Mr. Laidlay has basely given up his old deck and taken to a more modern putter of aluminium. He putts very well with it, holding it low down in an unorthodox manner, appearing to move his body, which is also unorthodox, and soothing the ball into the hole. But this is all a horrid dream, and we must continue to think of him with his childhood's cleek.

'A long steal ' is a golfing expression that does not seem to be so much used as it once was. Is it that there is nobody to-day so capable of playing it ? At any rate it is one peculiarly applicable to Mr. Laidlay. No man, I imagine, ever stole more holes that the other man thought he had safely in his pocket. One has always a picture of him arriving close to the hole from a horribly long way off with a diabolical pitch-and-run shot. The ball seems sure to be short, but it creeps on and on till it ends close to the hole. When I have watched him or played with him he has always missed or rather half-missed just enough wooden club shots to make his iron play the more tantalising. And those iron shots are played not in the modern and hideously efficient fashion with a firm dunch and a divot, but in a silky, insinuating way with the lightest and most delicate of grips. In Mr. Laidlay we see, I think, the manner of one who is an artist to his finger-tips, combined with a temperament eminently robust and practical. It is a very formidable alliance.

Robust seems a good word to apply to the golf of Mr. Leslie Balfour-Melville and Mr. Mure Fergusson, but in many ways their games were and are quite unlike each other. Mr. Balfour-Melville strikes one as an eminently natural player to whom the game came easily, for he has played almost every game very well. But he has overlaid, as it were, his natural game with a veneer of intense carefulness and concentration. He tries so hard that one notices this first and his natural genius for hitting any kind of ball afterwards. There never was a keener player nor a more perennially youthful one, and when he is in the eighties instead of the sixties he will still be trying the swing of the open champion of those days, who is now probably in petticoats. Mr. Everard was a true prophet when in the 'Badminton Library' he foretold that of the great players of that time - thirty years ago - Mr. Balfour-Melville would most successfully retain his game in later life. He based his prophecy on the trueness of the swing, but he must also surely have been thinking of that splendid and irrepressible youthfulness.

Mr. Mure Fergusson is also clearly a natural player, but with less faultless and orthodox and more palpably individual methods. There is not so much of carefulness in his game, but a very great deal of determination. In him, if ever there was one, we see the 'dour' player. Not only is he one who will never admit defeat. If one sees him, as occasionally one may, among the pinewoods of 'New Zealand,'one feels that he would not even admit that he ought not to have got there. It seems a hard fate that though Mr. Fergusson has a great reputation for holing critical putts, the one putt of his that will be best remembered is one that he missed. This was in 1898 in the St. George's Vase at Sandwich. He was playing with Mr. Tait: all day he had clung to him: with one hole to play the two were all square, well ahead of the field, and after each had played three shots Mr. Tait was away at the back of the green near the railings and Mr. Fergusson lay apparently dead. Then the one holed his long putt over hill and dale and the other missed his short one. If there are such things as unlucky golfers, Mr. Fergusson is one of them. The list of Amateur Champions does not seem quite complete without his name.

I have given some description elsewhere of one or two of Mr. Tait's great matches, but though I remember those matches well, I do not feel competent to analyse him as a golfer. He died some twenty years ago, and I hope I know more about golf now than I did then. History and legend has most to tell of his recoveries, but the impression in my mind is rather of easy and powerful accuracy, that called for no recoveries, except when that ugly right hand underneath the shaft asserted itself and made them necessary. I never saw any one who seemed more clearly to be playing 'within himself' nor with a more radiant confidence, and the boldness of his putting was unforgettable. More than anything else, however, I remember the worship of him by the Scottish crowd. For a doglike devotion to its hero combined with hostility and a touch of contempt towards other people it was unique. Few could have borne it so lightly and so engagingly.

With Mr. Harold Hilton we come to the best of all amateur score players, and perhaps the most interesting of all golfers amateur or professional, one who has devoted to the game with extraordinary singleness of purpose a very shrewd intelligence and a very close power of observation. Somebody once wrote of Mr. Hilton that he had 'slaved 'at the game when he was young. It is a statement that is in a sense quite true, and yet this verb, just ill-chosen, conveys entirely the wrong impression.

It gives a picture of one with little natural gift for the game toiling at it gloomily, to arrive at length at a respectable mediocrity. Mr. Hilton would have been a fine golfer if he had never thought about the game at all. Because he did think about it and look at it with those wonderfully observant eyes, he became a great one. I have never met any one who was so catholic in his taste for observation.

He will point out something that is new to us about the style of any golfing acquaintance, eked out with little imitative movements, inarticulate but most expressive ; and if now and then we may think that he refines too subtly, we had better be sure that it is not we who do not know enough. If moreover he watches golf with a very studious eye, he also watches it with a twinkling one, and no one gets more quiet amusement out of it.