In the autumn of 1887 I did a very foolish thing: I went to America. I do not by any means imply that it is not an essential part of a liberal education to visit that great country, nor do I mean that it would be any act of foolishness on the part of a golfer to go there now, but I do mean that in my own golfing circumstances, and in the golfing conditions of the States at that time—which was a condition of no golf at all—it was very silly of me to go away from golf for so long. For that is what it involved. I was abroad for several months. At that date there was no golf in the States. I did not touch a club while I was there; and after I came back, after this long while of letting the hand grow unfamiliar with the club, the game never came so easy to me again. From that experience I believe that it may be taken as a maxim by all golfers who have learnt the game as boys, that they run a risk of losing a measure of skill and confidence, which they may never regain, if they do not touch a club for many months together. You see, this game that a man has grown up with, learning it as his muscles grow, so that it is more or less literally true that he has "grown into it," is rather different from the game that he learns later, after his muscles have set. The effect of going away from golf for a long time is that you lose some of these lessons that you have acquired as you grew; you have then to re-learn them, so far as you may, as if they were a new acquisition that you had to take possession of after you have finished growing; and you never acquire quite the same unconscious and instinctive grasp of them.

I went to America again the following year. But it did not matter then. The harm had been done; the first and best lessons, or a large number of them, were lost—their teaching laboriously and only partially to be regained. And on that second visit I actually did take out some clubs.

It is a condition of things hardly to be realized now, but at that time there was not, to my knowledge, such a thing as a golf club or a golf ball in the United States. Canada had its established Clubs and courses at Quebec and Montreal. Probably somewhere, in secret places, some few Scots were pursuing their national pastime, on very "natural" courses, in the States too: it is impossible to think that it must not have been so. But probably their sanity was shrewdly doubted, and they did not court the public eye. As for "natural" courses, the whole boundless prairies at certain seasons invite the knocking of the golf ball about on them.

On this my second visit to America it had been suggested, I think by Mr. "Bob" Purdey, with whom I stayed near Meadowbrook, on Long Island, that I should bring some clubs over and show the people what sort of a game golf was. But I went first to Mexico and subsequently to California, leaving the clubs in New York the while, and when I came back sundry members of the Meadowbrook Club turned out on a certain Sunday to see me give an exhibition show. We cut some holes in the soil, probably with carving knives, and I proceeded to instruct them, by precept and example, as to what golf meant. I cannot think that my exposition was very effective. They did not seem to think that it meant very much. They tried shots for themselves, and the result of those trials was not such as to give them a very exalted opinion of golf. The most favourable criticism that I can recall was that "it might be a good game for Sundays." I do not think it was extravagant praise.

I believe that was the first time golf was ever played in the States, though there may, of course, have been these secret Scots, as I have said. However, the Meadowbrook people were so far impressed as to ask me to send them out some clubs, when I got back—which I did, from the shop of Peter Paxton, then at Eastbourne. But what became of those clubs I never heard. Neither they nor my excellent example inspired America with golfing zeal. That great country had to wait before awaking to a true sense of the merits of the great game. But time has its revenges and the awakening has come. Also, at the moment of writing, it has the effect of making England conscious that she must "Wake up"; for that twenty-year-old Mr. Ouimet has just taken the American championship, in a manner that has made history, out of what seemed the securely holding hands of either Ray or Vardon.

I think it was in 1888, soon after I came back from America, that I had my first match of any public note with Johnny Laidlay. I think it was the Town Council or some other people anxious to attract golfers to North Berwick—is it conceivable now that there should be a desire to attract more?—that gave some prizes for a scratch tournament open to all amateurs. Johnny Laidlay persuaded me to enter (he was my host for the occasion), and he gave me a good hammering in the final bout. For we both survived till the final, and I remember that, starting out, we both played badly enough for a hole or two. Then I lighted a pipe and smoked it, and it is a sign of how times have changed that one of the Scottish papers, commenting on the match, said, "At this point Mr. Hutchinson lit a pipe and smoked it and actually did not remove it from his mouth while playing the strokes—a thing never seen before in a big match." That seems queer comment at this time of day, when the incense of tobacco curls perpetually upward from the pipe of champion Ray and when the cigarette of Harold Hilton is like the fire that is never quenched. But the soothing of the nerves and accuracy of game that I had hoped to follow from the lighting of that particular pipe did not ensue. Mr. Laidlay found his game, while I was still looking vainly for mine, and he hammered me, if I remember right, pretty easily. The reporters were fairly out after me that day. They criticised the pipe unfavourably, and then one of them recorded a painful incident of the game in the following terse and pregnant sentence: "Here Mr. Hutchinson broke his niblick, his favourite club." I do not know whether this literary gentleman had seen me in bunkers and niblicking out of them so frequently that he inferred the niblick to be the club that I most loved to have in hand; at all events, that was his comment, and it went home. I think they must have had a golfing reporter at this time with a vein of ironic humour about him, for it was then, or nearly then, that one of them wrote about Captain Willy Burn: "Here the Captain hit one of his characteristic shots—far into the whins!" Whether it all was irony or innocence we did not know, for this commentator did his good work by stealth and we never found him out.

I was in no way surprised at losing that match with Mr. Laidlay, especially at North Berwick, where he was very strong. But I did lose a match about this time which I had not thought of losing, and by its loss did a little towards the making of golfing history. All history is curiously made. The coming of a little sandy-haired boy from Northam village to do the work that an odd boy does about our house near Northam village is not an incident that looks big with history, but when the little boy's name is known to be J.H. Taylor, the historical importance becomes evident. He left that "odd boy" work and went as a gardener's assistant, where, for a short while, we lost sight of him. But then he was put on as an assistant on the Westward Ho! links in aid of Sowden, the old Californian Forty-niner, who looked after the green, or left it to look after itself. We passed the time of day with him, quite as if we were his equals, with no notion of his future greatness. Then the Northam village players (I hardly know whether their Club was formally instituted by that date) said they would like to play the Royal North Devon Club a match. I was put to play Taylor. I did not think much about the job. I had hardly seen him play a stroke before. Going to the very first hole I remember a shot of his with a cleek: it went low; I thought he had half topped it; but it continued going. It had seemed certain to fall into the bunker guarding the green. But it carried that bunker and lay close to the hole. Again and again I found the same deceptive low-flying shot going a great deal further than I had expected it to. I began to realize then that it was because of his stance, with the ball so very far back towards his right. I also began to realize that I was a hole or two down. I did not play well; really, at that date, I ought to have beaten him. But he was one up with four to play, and then I laid him a stimy. He had two for the half. But instead of putting round, as all ordinary men of experience would, he tried to loft, for the hole, with his ordinary—and his only—flat iron. He just failed: but he holed the next putt, though he was not dead. Finally he beat me—I think at the last hole—and I congratulated him, as in duty bound, adding that when he knew a little more he would not be trying to loft stimies when he was one up and had two for the half. So I said, thinking to be wise, whereas it was I really who did not know—not knowing of what Taylor even then, and even with a flattish iron, was capable in the way of putting stop on the ball.