These two had many fights, but the one that most people will remember best was that in the final at Prestwick in 1899, when Mr. Ball, having been at one time five down in the morning round, won at the thirty-seventh hole. I am not going to tell all over again the story of Mr. Tait's shot out of the water in the Alps bunker. It has been told very often. One little incident about it sticks in my mind. As Mr. Tait waded into the big deep puddle he made little ripples flit across its face, and the ball began to rock ever so slightly where it floated. The late Mr. John Gairdner, most patriotic of Scottish golfers, was standing close to me, and I remember his calling out in an agony of apprehension, 'Wait till it stops, Freddy, wait till it stops.' I doubt if he realised that he was speaking at all.

Another scene is of Mr. Ball practising putting on the home green, before the second round began, with Mr. Hilton trying to set him on the right track. He had been putting very poorly in the morning, trying different clubs and different stances all more or less in vain. For this lesson from Mr. Hilton he brought out three clubs, his crook-necked putter, his straight-faced iron, and his driving cleek. The conference arrived at some conclusion as to what was wrong and Mr. Ball putted much better in the afternoon, but he still, if I remember rightly, coquetted at times with these three different clubs. I read a long account of the match again the other day, and thought how lacking in dramatic sense the writer was not even to mention these changes of club, and how I wished I could remember them exactly. There was one horrid moment (I write as an Englishman who passionately desired Mr. Ball to win). He had lopped off all Mr. Tait's half-time lead of three and stood one up at the tenth hole. Then his old disease attacked him and he missed a short putt at the eleventh. I can see him standing there and the little beast of a ball sitting obdurately on the edge of the hole.

At the twelfth there came a compensating joy. Mr. Tait made one of those astonishingly crooked shots of which he was now and again capable: he hooked the ball clean over the burn and out of bounds. The ball soared over the heads of the spectators on the left; many of them were completely unconscious of it and could not understand why he was playing a second ball. Of the final putt for that wonderful three on the thirty-seventh I saw, through somebody else's legs, only the blessed moment of the ball going into the hole. The player I could not see. Mr. Hilton was in the converse situation. He could see the player but not the ball. 'From where we stood,'he says, 'we could not see the outline of the hole, and it was impossible to tell whether the ball was going in or not, but I liked the look of the striker as his ball was travelling. I knew his attitudes well, and was not at all surprised when the ball disappeared.' I like that little bit of description. It is so typical of his powers of observation, and illustrates so well those crucial seconds of waiting that have to be endured in watching golf.

Another unforgettable match of Mr. Tait's was that against Mr. John Low in the semi-final at Hoylake in 1898. Mr. Tait ultimately won at the twenty-second hole. In a sense he certainly did not deserve to, for his opponent played far the sounder golf of the two, but the winner made two or three recovering shots of so prodigious a character that it seems ungenerous to call him lucky. I was in an ungenerous mood at the time, since I very badly wanted Mr. Low to win. To begin with, it seemed to me a match between a demigod and a man. It was my first Championship. I had only gazed awe-stricken on Mr. Tait from afar, when he came from Aldershot to Woking. Mr. Low I knew quite well : I had played with him: nay, I believe I had even won a casual round from him. I did not think that so human a person could withstand the godlike Tait. But as the round went on it was clear that he could. He was playing much the more steadily of the two on a raw blustery Hoylake day, and it seemed only by a series of miracles that Mr. Tait was not down. One of his shots certainly was miraculous. At the sixteenth-the Dun-he put his tee shot into the sandy ditch that guards the out-of-bounds country : got the ball out not very far, and then carried right home over the cross-bunker on to the green. Mr. Hilton has said that it was a carry of 200 yards: and that was with a gutty ball, let us not forget. It looked about a quarter of a mile, and for sheer carrying power at a crisis I have never seen that shot's equal. The match was all square with one to go, and Mr. Low's second over the bunker at the home hole had not too much to spare. I can see him now, as plain as print, in an old grey coat of voluminous folds with the collar turned up, urging on the ball with a wave of his club. That hole was halved: so was the nineteenth. At the twentieth my man was surely going to get his deserts at last. He was dead in three: Mr. Tait was away across the green in the grip in two and six to eight yards short in three, and-down went his putt with a horrid thud against the tin. Worse still was to come. Mr. Low was home in three sound shots at the twenty-first. Mr. Tait went out of bounds, and his one hope, and that a slender one, was to put his fourth not only on the green but close to the hole with a wooden-club shot. It seems to me now, in remembering it, another vast carrying shot. In point of fact it was not enormously long, but it was beautifully struck. Some people say that the ball hit a mole-heap and kicked in towards the hole. At any rate it left him within a few yards of the hole. Even so he surely could not be going to hole another putt-but he did, and got his half in five. Flesh and blood could hardly stand up against this. On the Cop green Mr. Low and his putter failed for once, and the match was over.

In 1912, at Westward Ho!, there was a wonderful finish between Mr. Ball and Abe Mitchell, then an amateur, Mr. Ball winning at the thirty-eighth hole. Mr. Ball was being outdriven by many yards from the tee in the first round, and was 'hanging on' for dear life. He was three down at lunch-time. In the afternoon there came on squalls and flurries of rain, and it was this, I think, that beat the younger player and won the match for the veteran. In remembering it I always think of the account of the prize-fight in Lavengro, when the boy is fighting the man and there comes on a great storm of hail and rain: 'The boy strikes the man full on the brow, but it is no use striking that man, his frame is adamant. Boy, thy strength is beginning to give way, thou art becoming confused; the man now goes to work amidst rain and hail.' And Mr. Ball did go to work that afternoon. He was reported to have said that if he could halve the first three holes, which gave his opponent the advantage in length, he would just about win. He went one better and won one of the three. It was not very long before he had the match squared. Once he was one up, but Mitchell stuck to his guns most gamely and with three to go they were all square. At the sixteenth, Mr. Ball was laid what appeared the deadest of dead stymies. He studied the line and looked up at his adversary with a half smile and a little shake of his head ; and then using an aluminium putter he played the putt with the right strength to a fraction of an inch: the ball just reached the edge of the hole, hesitated, and fell in. At the seventeenth, Mr. Ball was bunkered in his second and Mitchell became dormy one. At the eighteenth, both were about four feet away in three. With 'this for the Championship' Mitchell played the odd, pushed the ball out to the right, and missed : down went the like and the match was squared. The first extra hole was halved in five, Mitchell making a glorious recovery from the wet ditch to the left of the green. The crowd rushed forward towards the second hole. One ball came straight down the middle-that was Mr. Ball's. Then came a mysterious pause-there was no other ball-what had happened? We ran back to see and discovered it was all over. Mitchell had topped his drive into a ditch, and with his second attempt at getting out had played the ball on to himself.