IV

Can anything in a mechanical sort of way be done to overcome this awful difficulty? I fear not, though one or two new putters are invented every week, and some of them are acclaimed as being the philosopher's stone for which we have been looking. The golf world began to buzz as if its mainspring had got loose when Mr. Travis won the championship at Sandwich with that Schenectady putter - the most epoch-making putter of all. But where is it now? Very few people use it.

Putters have been made of every conceivable shape and of every possible material. Counting all variations, there are thousands of kinds of putters. They have been made with the heads bent back, forwards, and sideways. Some of them have had very thin blades, and others have had thick slabs instead of blades. They have been fashioned like knives, hammers, spades, croquet mallets, spoons, and riddles, and some even like putters; and they have been made of iron, gun-metal, steel, aluminium, nickel, silver, brass, wood, bone, and glass. I have here beside me a putter made in nickel, and consisting of a large roller, running on ball bearings! It is no good. The simplest are the best. We cannot obtain will-power by machinery or mechanical appliances. Mr. James Robb tells me that the putter he always uses is an ordinary cleek which he got when a boy. His sister won it in a penny raffle, and having no use for it herself she gave it to him, and he has putted with it ever since. Three times has he putted his way to the final of the championship, and once has he won it. Again, Mr. J. E. Laidlay conveys the information to me that when he was a boy at Loretto School he came by the first golf clubs he ever had in his life in his second or third term, these being a cleek and a brassey. That cleek-head has been his putter ever since, and it is getting so light with wear that his friends are beginning to tell him that it will soon do for him to shave with. Harry Vardon won his first championship with a putter which was not a putter at all, but a little cleek that he had picked up only the day before in Ben Sayers' shop at North Berwick. He fancied it as a putter, and he has never putted better than on that day at Muirfield. He has never used it since, and now he has taken to the aluminium putter. And do you know that just before the famous championship at Sandwich, Mr. Travis was using a putting cleek that he, too, had got at North Berwick, and it was his intention to putt with it in the tournament ? But he was not putting very well in practice at St. Andrews, and one of his compatriots then introduced to him for the first time in his life the Schenectady, which, after one successful trial, was forthwith commissioned for Sandwich. What a subject for a great historical painting to be hung up in the Temple of Golf that we shall have some day- "Emmett introducing the Schenectady to Travis, 1904." I think it was Emmett; if it wasn't, then it was Byers. Anyhow, golf history was changed in consequence of that introduction, for I am sure that Mr. Travis would not have won at Sandwich with his North Berwick putting cleek. It wasn't the Schenectady that did it, but it was the player's then confidence in the Schenectady. He had, for the time being, got that little devil of golf in chains, and putting had become a great joy.

V

Golf is a jealous sport, and often takes it ill when any of its patrons devote their attention occasionally to other diversions of the open air, and exacts from them such a penalty in failures and aggravation when they come back to their true love as is calculated to make them hesitate before committing further offences. Perhaps it is natural in a way that golf, which has so much of wild nature about it, should be least inclined to brook the rivalry of games of the namby-pamby order. Fine field sports such as shooting and fishing do not put you off your golf, in fact we have generally concluded that a few days' fishing sandwiched in a golfing holiday rather does good to your game. Perhaps it stimulates your thinking qualities, and if you are not reflecting upon the other and the better way in which you might have played the seventeenth hole the day before, when you should be noticing the significant manoeuvres of something in the water, all is well. But a game that golf cannot and will not tolerate acquaintanceship with upon any consideration, is croquet. The royal and ancient one has decided apparently that it will not recognise it in any way whatever, and that it will give a bad time to any golfer who potters about on a lawn with hoops and bells and wooden sledgehammers. And it does so. There is no more sure way of disturbing your putting than an hour or two's croquet. This putting poison is most deadly efficacious, and its effects sometimes last for a couple of days. The man has not yet been born who can putt well after a game of croquet. Croquet is really putting, but putting with a big heavy ball after the style of a cannon ball, and it has to be putted on a woolly green of rough grass in which a golf ball would do something towards burying itself. Your accommodating eye and touch soon become accustomed to the big ball and the mallet, and you begin to putt through the hoops exceeding well, feeling then that you hold an advantage over-others through usually having to manage a smaller ball under more difficult circumstances. But the awkward part of the business is that the eye and touch won't go back again so readily to their golfing adjustment, and while they are out of it some funny things are likely to happen. At such times the golf ball looks impossibly small, and, while one is overcome with the idea that it will need remarkably delicate management, one finds it impossible to wield the putter as it should be. Here is the story of a recent happening:

A and B are keen rivals on the links - so keen that there is always great haggling when it comes to adjusting the odds for a match, B usually giving A three strokes. On the present occasion A informed B that he would be glad to play him a match on the afternoon of the following day. B wanted to know why they could not make a full day of it and play in the morning as well, but A pleaded that he had to take part in a tom-fool croquet match to which he was committed at the house where he was staying. They settled the terms of the next afternoon's encounter at the same time, and B said that as A would be playing croquet in the morning he would be willing to give him five strokes. This was really foolish of him; but no matter. A thought something, but said nothing. The golf match was duly played on the following day, and, to the mortification of B, the croquetter putted like an angel the whole way round, won his match by 6 and 5, won the bye, and, holing a ten-yarder to wind up with, took the bye-bye as well. B was naturally in a most unhappy state of mind, and moaned that he had never before known a man to be able to putt after playing croquet, and that it was because of this that he had given A two extra strokes on that dismal day. "Croquet! croquet!" exclaimed A, "but I haven't been playing croquet!" B stood aghast. "You Jiaverit!" he shrieked; "then what the dickens were you doing this morning?" "Oh," said A, "I took the hint from what you said yesterday, and cried off the croquet match. I spent an hour instead in practising putting on the carpet, and stuffed the fire-irons underneath to make undulations!" There are one or two very good morals in this pathetic little story.