One hears it said sometimes by versatile and thorough-going sportsmen, that of all the sweet sensations to be discovered and enjoyed occasionally in the whole world of sport, the hitting of a perfect tee shot is one of the best, one of the only two or three best. These men are probably right, for the hitting of a really spanking ball from the tee, when one feels the complete absence of a grating or a jerking anywhere in the system, showing that the whole of the most complicated movement has worked round the centre with the accuracy of a watch, and that every ounce of available power has thus been put into the drive to the greatest advantage—this is a fine thing to feel, and the pity is that the joy of it is so fleeting, and that the memory of it has entirely gone a few minutes later when some succeeding shot has not been quite so good.

But is there not another feeling which comes to a man in the game sometimes which is even more uplifting, much more so? It lasts longer, and it is fuller, richer. The man is then transformed, etherealised; he is no longer a thing of this crawling, walking world; and he is not a mere man on the links as he used to be, happy, indeed, for the most part, but very human, with many adversities to encounter, as generally in this world. The man is raised for a while to the higher state, and his golfing soul floats in Valhalla when he is suddenly permitted to play many holes in succession better than he had ever played holes before—everything perfect, and a little more than perfect, which means fortunate all the way from the tee to the flag. It is one of those days which have been dreamt about and regarded as impossible, when the marvellous coincidence has occurred of the man being “on” everything at the same time, and of everything going right when he was thus on them. Aforetime it has been that when he was on six things a seventh has led him astray, and there has always been a seventh at least, if not another too. The factor of evil could never be cancelled. But this time it is, and it is as if the gods, smiling benevolently on the lucky and successful player, determine that he shall be happy to the utmost, and therefore they allow him all the good fortune that is theirs to give. The most perfect balls are driven from the tee, the most impossible carries are accomplished; there is a delightful crispness about the approaches, and the six-feet putts are holed with precision and confidence; while here and there, to the utter demoralisation of the arch enemy par, to say nothing of the poor man who is the human victim of it all, the long putts go down as well.

It is, perhaps, given to most players to be stirred with this indescribable joy once or twice in their lives—seldom more than that. It is not until three or four holes have been played that the full realisation of what is happening comes to the favoured player, and it is then that he is rapidly etherealised. His joy may last for another four or five holes; it will seldom endure a round. I have seen men when they have been in this state and under this most extraordinary influence, and they have not then been as they are at other times. Their inward ecstasy shines outside them. There is a curious nervous smile on their faces, and their eyes gleam. Their steps are short and hurried. They seldom speak, and when they do there is a touch of incoherency in their remarks. It is best that they should not be spoken to. They are suffering from a curious dementia of exaltation. They have help from Olympus, and history is being made. When I have seen it done I have once or twice made a close study of the behaviour of the man, and I know that it is as I have written. One of the most memorable occasions on which I witnessed this super-exaltation was during an Open Championship at Sandwich, when records were being made, and when at last a fine amateur player seemed to set out towards the making of one more. Hole after hole was played with that combination of perfection and fortune, and at last the man fell under the influence, and you could see it in possession of him as he went tripping along. You knew that, phlegmatic as a golfer must be who aspires to the greatest achievements, and as this one often was even in the hour of crisis, his heart was now beginning to beat. Soon afterwards it was all over; there was an amazing catastrophe on a fiery putting green and four or five putts were needed there. Three years later I saw the same man with the exaltation in him again at Muirfield, when he went through to a great achievement. I shall not forget the look of that man when he was doing these things. It is a chilly descent when the spell is broken, and it is all earth and clay again, but in the reaction there is no suffering. A happy reason comes to the rescue of the throbbing player, and he is reminded that such things are not to be for always, lest golf should not be what it is.

II

When the sun shines the putting greens get keen. There is an old saying that driving is an art, iron play a science, and putting is the devil. Just that—the devil. I agree entirely, and I have ascertained that the greatest exponents of the game are in sympathy with the suggestion.

Well may the writers of text-books of the game declare, when they come to the chapter on putting, that there is really nothing to say, and that they must leave the reader to find out the whole business by instinct and practice, as there are no rules to be laid down for his guidance. What would be the use of their pretending that they can really teach putting when, if they had to hole an eight-feet putt for a championship, the odds would be slightly against them? In June 1905, while I was smoking my pipe on the top of the bank on the far side of the home green at St.Andrews, I was being provided at intervals of no great length with much food for reflection and philosophy, better than which no man who ever talks or writes of golf could wish for. The Open Championship was being played for, and there duly came along Vardon, Braid, Taylor, and Herd, all more or less favourites for the event in progress, and it is a real fact that of these four men three of them missed putts at this home hole of less than a yard. I think the average length was about eighteen inches; one of them was not more than a foot, and the way in which the ball was worked round to the far side of the hole without going in was wonderful—quite wonderful. It will be noticed that I give four names and mention only three misses. This is because even the greatest players are sometimes very tender on this subject of missing short putts, and to spare them any annoyance I do not name the particular individuals who failed. It is enough that one of them, and one only, did not.

The history of every man’s golf is covered with metaphorical gravestones as the result of all the short putts he has missed. Every season the whole course, and the result of almost every event of importance, would be changed if one or other of the parties did not miss some of these apparently unmissable putts. One need go no farther back than last year’s Amateur Championship meeting. I saw Mr.John Graham miss a two-feet putt in his match with Mr.Robb on the fourteenth green. This was the all-important match of the whole tournament, and in the light of what happened afterwards it was made to appear that the missing of this putt cost Mr.Graham the best chance he ever had in his hard and deserving golfing lifetime of winning the blue ribbon of the game. Mr.Robb himself fancied that Mr.Robert Andrew would be the ultimate winner of the championship that time at Hoylake, but on the eighteenth green in one of his rounds Mr.Andrew missed a putt of less than a foot for the match, and then had to go on to the nineteenth hole, where he was a well-beaten man. And in the final tie of all, if Mr.Lingen had never missed a short putt, who knows but what he would have been the champion of the year after all?

Therefore we may take it as established that the very greatest players cannot do the very shortest putts with anything approaching to certainty, when it is of the very greatest importance that they should do so. They are no better at this game than quite moderate players, and the chances of their holing such putts decrease according to the importance of the occasion—that is to say, the more necessary it is to hole the putt in order to promote one’s success in the encounter in progress, the less likely is one to do so. This is one of the fundamental principles of the thing. Anybody can hole a putt of four or five feet when it doesn’t matter, and when there is no particular credit in doing it. It is when it does matter that you cannot do it. The hole is 4¼in. wide, and the ball is about 1½in. in diameter. You may use anything from an umbrella to a lawn-roller in order to putt that little ball into that huge pit, and yet at that distance of three or four feet you cannot do it—that is, as often as you ought to do. Training and practice are no use. Do not beginners always do these putts well? That is because they do not know how difficult they are. They will by and by, and then they will begin to miss them! At home I have a little baby girl, and sometimes she gets one of my putters out of the corner, and begs for the loan of a ball. Make a sort of hole on the carpet, or even go out on to the lawn and play at a real hole in the real way, and that little thing will hole the putts of a yard and two yards every time! She never bothers about any particular stance or anything of that kind, and takes no count of the blades of grass or where she ought to be looking at the much-talked-of “moment of impact.” She just putts, and down goes the ball every time! It is wonderful, one of the most wonderful things in sport that I have ever seen! Here she does that, and we others who know so much about these things, cannot do them—at least, not with the same certainty.

Here is another point. It may need only an exceedingly delicate stroke to putt a ball properly, yet if you take the clumsiest, horniest-handed labouring man—say a road-mender or a railway navvy, who had never either seen or heard of golf before—he would never miss those three to five feet putts. Again it is because he does not know how really difficult they are. It is said that a mighty hunter of great renown, a man who had bagged all the big game of India in great variety, once declared in an agony, “I have encountered all the manifold perils of the jungle, I have tracked the huge elephant to his retreat, and I have stood eye to eye with the man-eating tiger.” All of which was quite true—he had. Then he added, “And never once have I trembled until I came to a short putt.”

I have thought the matter out, and I suggest the reason. It is one of the prettiest points in psychology that one will encounter in the whole of a long lifetime of the most careful thought and study. You don’t really want any mind at all for putting purposes. The whole thing is too simple, and instead of a mind and brains being any use for the purpose in hand, they are a positive disadvantage, and are continually getting in the way.

III

Consciousness is often fatal in putting, and it is the conscience making a coward of the man that makes him miss his putt. To hole a three-feet putt over a flat piece of green is really one of the easiest things in the world; there can be no doubt about it. But while there is one ridiculously easy way of doing the putt, there are about a dozen more or less difficult ways of missing it, and these dozen are uppermost in the mind of the golfer when he comes to his effort. Thus the missing of the short putt represents the greatest triumph of matter over mind that is to be found in the whole range of sport, or, so far as I know, in any other pursuit in life. But why should a man be given to these morbid thoughts of the ways of missing, and why should he not be of hopeful, courageous disposition, and attack the hole boldly and with confidence, instead of remembering these dozen ways of missing? That is what non-golfers ask.

It is an easy question to set; but there is another factor in the situation that has to be mentioned. There is the sense of responsibility, and this sense of responsibility is probably greater in a man when he is making a putt of from three to five feet than it is in the case of any other man at any time in any other sport, because he will never, never have the chance again that he has got this time. If he putts and misses, the deed is irrevocable, the stroke and the hole or the half have been lost, and nothing that can happen afterwards can remove the loss. If a man makes a bad drive, or if his approach play is weak, he can atone for these faults by being unusually clever with the subsequent stroke in the play to the hole, and he thinks he will. But the short putt is the very last stroke in that play, and if it is missed there is no possible atonement to be made. Thus there is something of the awful, of the eternal, of the infinite about the putt; the man is awe-stricken; he knows it is easy, but he is conscious of those dozen ways of missing. So he misses. I have put the question to a number of the best-known players of the day as to what were their precise thoughts—if any—when they came to making the final putt of a great match, which in many cases gave them a championship. Their answer almost universally was that their thought was, “What a fool I shall look if I miss this putt!” Thus they knew that they ought not to miss it, but they were burning with consciousness of the fact that they were terribly liable to do so. So matter triumphs over mind.

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 haven’t!” 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.

If you need to putt perfectly you should do nothing with your hands, and as little as possible with the remaining parts of your physical construction for a whole day beforehand. The fact is that everything puts you off your putting, but some things more than others, which is another reason for that old saying that putting is the devil. An old golfer has said that the ideal preparation for really fine putting is to lie in bed for twenty-four hours with your wife to feed you with a spoon. A few hours’ penmanship is certainly fatal to one’s putting, and typewriting is worse. A man may depend upon it that if he goes in for a motor-car and drives it, he will henceforth be about three or four strokes worse on the greens than he used to be, which accounts for the anxiety of so many golfers to sell their new cars. And oh, that my best golfing enemy would buy a motor-cycle! A player once told me that he could not putt in the afternoon after having found it necessary to beat his dog at lunch-time; and it has been observed to be quite a bad thing for one’s putting to use a walking-stick in one’s ordinary pedestrianism. The putting muscles and nerves are the most delicate, subtle things in the whole of animal creation, and the pity is that circumstances generally preclude their more careful preservation during the periods in one’s life when they are not needed for holing-out purposes.

VI

Now the society season is most alive. The golfing society—without a course of its own and consisting generally of men who have some other common interest, usually business or professional, apart from their love for the game—is becoming an increasingly popular institution in the south, and some people who have had to find fault with the constitution and general scheme of such bodies, have now to confess that their protests have been completely without avail, and that, for good or ill, these combinations have settled permanently with us. Considering the circumstances of the time and the great advance in the popularity of the game, they must be regarded as a natural evolution. After all, those people who regard the society as a kind of new-fangled notion and an undesirable development, need to have it pointed out to them that it is the oldest kind of golf community, and that nowhere does it flourish more than in the great Scottish centres of the game. For example, a great majority of the clubs of Edinburgh are not clubs at all, as the term is understood in the south, but merely golfing societies, made up often of men with another common interest, and the only difference between them and the southern societies is that they have a public course to play upon and are dependent upon the kind favour of nobody for the playing of the game; whereas in the south there are no public courses, and the societies have necessarily to crave the permission of clubs for the courtesy of their greens on the days when they wish to go out to play their matches and competitions.

Perhaps some day there will be public courses in the south on which the societies may play. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the societies combined are even now almost strong enough to obtain and keep up a course of their own. In these days the societies’ subscriptions are seldom more than five or ten shillings, but the majority of members would be agreeable to pay a guinea for the pleasures that they receive, and on such an increase it ought not to be a difficult matter to devise some scheme for the establishment of a society course. Alternatively, it is suggested that the societies might do something towards giving a substantial financial backing to some club or other that is in a bad way in this respect, on the condition that they had the use of that club’s course on midweek days for all genuine competitions and matches. Against this it has to be considered that one of the charms of society golf, as it is conducted in the south at the present time, is the opportunities that are given to members of visiting and playing over courses which are unfamiliar to them and which are not generally accessible, and of organising expeditions of members to these courses in the way of having a good day out together. All those who have experienced this pleasure know that it makes one of the most delightful variations from the ordinary routine of a golfer’s life.

There is no reason to suppose that clubs generally, or any club in particular, are hostile to the society idea and practice, and we have not yet heard of any case in which a club has declined permission to a society to play its match or competition on its course. So far from that being the case, the most important clubs of all, with the best courses, have shown a marked amiability in the matter. Still, from time to time there have been people who have suggested future difficulties, and even hinted at an abuse by societies in general of the good nature and courtesy of the clubs; and in view of the fact that in two years from now there will probably be ten societies for every two that are at present in existence, just as even now there are about five times the number that there was two years since, it will be as well if the clubs think the matter out and decide upon their policy, and, so far as they are able to do so, or regard it as politic, to announce it. When they do come to consider the matter, they will do well to do so on the broad basis of the common good, and to remember that an enormous factor in bringing about the increase in the popularity of golf, and in affording the great delights that golfers of the present day derive from the game, has been the principle of the community of interests which is generally agreed upon. When a man becomes a member of a “recognised golf club” in these days, he becomes ipso facto a kind of provisional member of all other golf clubs, that is to say, upon the payment of certain small fees and on a proper introduction—that of the secretary of his own club being commonly regarded as sufficient—he has some claim upon the courtesy of any other club whose green he may like to visit. The members of a club that extends these privileges to strangers obtain those of a like kind from other clubs, and thus to the individual player there is opened up the entire variety of all the golf in the country. How much would our pleasure in the game be reduced if this variety were not available, and we were compelled to play exclusively upon the courses of clubs of which we were full members!

In this matter we have the principle of the community of golfers’ interests in full play, and it seems that the proper recognition of the society and its right to the privileges that it seeks will be only another form of the same principle, and one scarcely less advanced than that which obtains at present. For already a fair proportion of the members of a club are members also of one or other societies, and the time is coming when it will be the exception for the club golfer not to be a member of a society. When this time arrives, it will evidently be necessary to apply this principle referred to, partly for the general good and enjoyment, and partly because any club that did not, and that withheld privileges to societies that were granted them by other clubs, would place all its own members who belonged to such societies in a very unpleasant position. Two rules seem to be called for. The first is, that in order that this principle shall always act fairly, and that no man shall get what he is not in a sense entitled to, it shall be enacted that each member of a society shall also be a member of a club in the district in which the society chiefly carries on its operations. The second is, that in all cases of society visits to clubs’ courses, full green fees shall be paid, and that in no pecuniary sense shall the society be under any obligation to the club. The whole question is really one of very great importance, and those who are at the head of club and society affairs would do well to be giving to it their serious consideration, for nothing would be more unfortunate than the creation of any misunderstanding which might lead to trouble in the future.

VII

The other day there was a little house-party of golfers for a week-end, and it was a most delightful gathering in all respects—fine weather, a rattling good seaside links, with putting greens that inspired the soul of the player to fine flights of genius, and a host of the very best golfing type, in whom is embodied all the best traditions and sportsmanship of the game. Sternly contested singles in the morning of the first day, with the yellow autumn sun shining and that pleasant nip in the air that braces the golfer to great efforts when he takes the wood out of his bag; a hard-fought foursome in the afternoon; and then as they dressed to go down for dinner on the evening of the first day, they reflected upon the magnificent opportunities of the golfing life and the poor state of those who were not such as they were then. Dinner, the glass of old port, piquant stories of the links and the recounting of brave deeds in fine matches, and then by and by the testing of various putting theories on the carpet—O! the happy, happy golfer.

Forty years upon the links had one by one only served to increase the host’s enthusiasm for the game of games. In all things he was the golfer first and the ordinary individual afterwards. Like all experienced players, he was inclined to be dogmatic and, as some would say, old-fashioned. But when you say that a golfer is old-fashioned you are paying him a very high compliment; you are placing his portrait in an exclusive gallery of the old masters of the game who built it up and endowed it with traditions such as are the envy of all others. The old-fashioned golfer nearly always belongs to the best type of the fine old English or Scottish gentleman. But this host had still original ideas of his own, and sometimes within the walls of his own house he will tell of them, or let them slip by accident, which he might very much fear to do when in the company of his colleagues of the Royal and Ancient on the occasion of his bi-annual pilgrimages to St.Andrews. So on the second morning, when the party was at breakfast and eager to arrange the matches of the day, its curiosity was somewhat stirred by the remark that he made to madame as she was lading the blue cups with tea, that last night he “went round in 78.” The lady of the house nodded and smiled, asked sympathetically if he had had any luck at the short holes, and was assured that he had taken 3 to one and 4 to the other, but had got his 78 by the aid of a grand—yes, by gad, a really corking 3 at the last hole! On the whole, it was gathered he was driving well, but his iron play was not all that it might have been—putting splendid. Now nothing had been heard before of any such fine performance as this, as surely there would have been if, as it appeared, it was of such recent date. The company was stirred with a desire for knowledge as to the when and the how, so that they might not be laggard in their compliments upon the making of such an evidently pretty piece of golf. A 3 at the eighteenth, too! If that was the same eighteenth the flag upon whose putting green we could just see from the window now, it was a 3 to be spoken of with admiration and profound respect. And so one at the table murmured that they had a desire for knowledge upon this 78, which so evidently interested the chief, but he pooh-poohed the curiosity, and said that the recounting of that particular round would do better for a wet day than for a morning when all were so keen to be playing the real golf. The “real” golf; so there was a qualification imparted to that round of 78, and now they would not be denied. Come! come! And so they had the secret out.

It appeared that though he looked so well and hale, the chief was not one of those happy beings who after their days upon the links go to rest at night and drop clean away into a dreamless sleep. There is usually a preliminary period of insomnia, which is an unpleasant relic of some hard times that he had abroad in the middle years of his life. It is an effort with him to “drop off,” and many and various have been the devices that in his time he has employed for wooing Morpheus to his nightly service. For a long time he played the old game of shepherdry. When the candle was extinguished and his head was laid upon the pillow, he set up before him an imaginary hedge, a big thick hedge which divided one large field from another, and in this hedge there was just one small gap through which one sheep could pass at a time, or two by squeezing when in a hurry. Why the sheep should be driven from one field into the other no man can say; but on countless nights by many poor sufferers from too much wakefulness, millions upon millions of sheep have been driven through this same gap in the hedge. Through it they are hurried in their ones and twos in a seemingly never-ending line. There is no limit to this flock, and it is of the essence of the trick that is being played against the enemy, insomnia, that the shepherd shall attend most strictly to his duties, and never for a single moment shall let his thoughts wander to other and more real affairs. And so at last the active brain gives way, and as the tail-end of one big sheep is seen disappearing through the gap a thick haze comes down upon the fields, and the shepherd and his sheep are lost until the morning.

The chief was shepherd for some years, and it was only by the odd accident of dwelling fondly for a few minutes, as he laid himself down in bed, upon the fine things he had done in one great match that day that he came by a change of nightly occupation. With the links laid out before him on the inner side of his eyelids, he played every shot again, and if the truth must be told, he played some of them twice, and in this way he proved to his own immense satisfaction that, soul-satisfying as had been his play that day, his round was morally at least three strokes better than it had worked out. He played his round from the first tee to the eighteenth green on the eyelid links once, and so pleasant was the play that, like the gourmand golfer, he must needs play it again, shot by shot; and a third time he set out with his clubs. But this time he was tiring. The two mental rounds that had gone before had told their tale, and he was constantly finding his wayward ball in the rough, and making sometimes fine recoveries with his iron clubs, and sometimes taking two to get clear again. You see he always played the game. Perfection in golf is not given to any man, and even in the eyelid game one must pull and slice at times, must now and again socket with the irons, and take one’s eye off the little white ball. And so it happened that at last the tired brain surrendered, and upon the fifteenth green, with the match still unfinished—one up and three to go—he fell asleep.

Thenceforth the shepherdry was given up, and he took on the eyelid golf instead. Two rounds he played every night, and every time he played the game, refusing to allow himself things he had not clearly seen himself do, and not taking unto himself the power of doing miracles or of always playing the perfect golf. In that there would have been great monotony, just as there would be if we always played perfect golf in our real life upon the links. He never made a carry in this nightly imagination that he had not made in daylight, never laid an iron shot dead, or holed a putt the like of which he had not done with real club and ball. Some nights he would be off his game, and his score would run far up into the nineties, and he would be badly beaten. On those nights he might go to sleep a little sooner than usual. On others he would be playing the best game of his youth. In general he found the occupation much more pleasant and agreeable to his tastes than the shepherdry, and it is a curious thing, which one must believe since he said so, that these night rounds, with all their thoughts and their minor anxieties, actually did something towards the improvement of the real game that was played in the daytime. The player now and then obtained new and good ideas, and he was taught to be a little more thoughtful than perhaps he had been in the past. By and by the secret of this play became too much for him to keep, so he unfolded the story of his eyelid games to the lady partner of his life, who, since the real service that they did to him was evident to her sympathetic mind, treated it with becoming seriousness. This was the explanation of the 78 that was spoken of at breakfast-time that morning, and in it there is a hint that might sometime prove of service to those who, like the host of that week-end, are sometimes troubled for want of that ability to loose their thoughts to sleep.

VIII

One does not see St.Andrews at its best at a time of a championship, or at any other time when there are great crowds in the streets and on the courses, and swarming round about the clubhouse and outside the shops of the clubmakers overlooking the eighteenth green. It is not its natural self then; it is at its worst. I do not like it when the trippers pour in from Glasgow. One cannot resist the suspicion that many of them are not as good golfers as they ought to be, and that they love St.Andrews for what they save by her, being the only course in the world on which a man may play for nothing; with a kindly Corporation and a great club spending large sums of money upon it. To keep those marvellous greens in their fine state they employ a genius among greenkeepers, who is Hugh Hamilton, who is the successor of Tom Morris, who was the successor of Allan Robertson. It may seem strange to some that the play should be made without any charge, but St.Andrews would not be the same, and would lose rather than gain in dignity, if it were not free. The time to see it at its best is in the spring, and it is fine again in the late autumn, when the mere holiday-makers have gone back to their cities and workshops.

The only time when a crowd is bearable at St.Andrews is on the autumn medal day, and then, indeed, it is as if the tradition and the sanctity of the place are intensified. This surely is the great Celebration Day of golf. With its dignity, ceremony, tradition, crowds, and excitement, it is really very much like a Lord Mayor’s Day. Old folks who may have never played, wee bairns who are only just beginning to think they will play when they can walk a little better, are all straining to excitement because it is the club’s medal day, the day of the Royal Medal, and of the captain’s playing himself in, and of the firing of the guns. From north, south, east, and west—many of them from London—the members of the Royal and Ancient Club foregather for the occasion. There is a hushed solemnity overhanging the place. Something is about to be done that used to be done in the days of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers, and the men on the links on this occasion feel themselves to be the descendants—as often enough they are in blood—of the great golfers of old who made the early chapters of the history of the game.

The playing-in to the captaincy is a great ceremony, for this captaincy of the Royal and Ancient Club is the highest honour to be achieved in the game. No man who is not of the highest character and of the greatest golfing integrity is ever chosen for this high office. To be captain of the club is quite comparable to being Lord Mayor of London. Amateur champions have been captains, but no man may be captain because he has been amateur champion. It is an understanding that the captain shall win the Silver Club, given by the club a century and a half ago, and the Gold Medal, which was presented by Queen Adelaide in 1838, when she expressed the wish that the captain would wear it on all public occasions, as he does at the club meetings; and to make sure of the coincidence of the captaincy and the winning of these trophies it is ordained by custom that the captain-elect shall have no opponents in the round that he is supposed to play; and, furthermore, to make his path to victory as smooth and easy as possible, he is merely called upon to tee up his ball on the first tee in front of the clubhouse, to drive it off, and then he is supposed to have played his round and to have gained his victory.

Thus this simple historic ceremony of teeing up and driving off for the Silver Club and the Royal Adelaide Medal is a great function. Crowds gather to witness it, and a line of men and boys is stretched out along the course from the tee, often giving to the hero of the moment an all too narrow margin for error in his stroke. It is ordained that this ceremony shall be performed at the exact stroke of ten o’clock in the morning, and when the hand of the clock on the clubhouse points to that hour a military person fires a small cannon on the foreshore and—crack!—the captain-elect drives his ball, and he thus advances to the topmost height of honour. The boys rush for the ball, which, being gained by one of them, becomes an heirloom in his family. And then the real competition begins at once, and the new captain may take part in it if he wishes. The prize now is the Gold Medal with the green riband, which was given by King WilliamIV. in 1837. The King himself decreed that it should be challenged and played for annually, and, writing from St.James’s Palace, he expressed “his satisfaction in availing himself of this opportunity to evince his approbation of that ancient institution.” Two by two the great golfers of the time go out to play for it, and excitement is keen as the day wears on. The last couple having holed out on the eighteenth green, the cannon is fired again to indicate that for one more year the Royal Medal has been won and lost, and all is over so far as the outdoor proceedings of the meeting are concerned.

In the evening is the feast, when the new captain achieves the full measure of his dignity. Hoary traditions surround his presidency at all meetings. In days of old, in the century before last, captains were fined pints and magnums of claret for certain delinquencies. At this feast the captain and ex-captains sit at the high table, in red coats, with all the ancient insignia of the club laid out on the table before them. Silver clubs are set there, to one of which each of all the long line of captains has fastened a silver ball, with his name and the date of his captaincy engraved upon it. The winner of the King WilliamIV. Medal is toasted, and he is called up from his place that the captain with solemn ceremony may invest him with the medal, hanging it round his neck. Then, upon occasion, new members of this ancient club have been called up before the captain, who, holding one of the silver clubs before them, calls upon them to kiss it and to swear honour and obedience to the laws and customs of the club and the game. And then great golfers of the old school may sing old ballads, and an evening of happiness goes on, and if there are no trains to be caught in the morning, matches are made to-night. This is St.Andrews.

IX

The sowing of seed upon a course may seem a dull business, and the average golfer leaves the consideration of all such matters to those whose duty it is to attend to them, and contents himself with his play on the resulting turf; but in this indifference he misses much that is interesting, and occasionally some most pleasant humours, as witness the true story of what happened on a suburban links. A very thorough club manager had bought many bags of two different kinds of seed, which were to be used by an intelligent workman for the benefit of the course, according to a scheme already devised and discussed. One kind of seed was that which would produce long, thick grass of a very coarse character, and which would grow with big and almost indestructible roots under the very worst of circumstances. It was intended that this should be sown under the many trees that abounded on the course. It was not only to be grass that would thrive under the most disadvantageous circumstances, but it was meant also to be “rough,” which might some day do something to stimulate the power of language among those golfers who just now might play from underneath the branches of those trees with their putters. The other seed was that which would make grass of the very finest texture. It needed a delicate, well-groomed soil for its sustenance, and its prime object was to produce putting greens that would give great joy to golfers on their game.

So the contents of some bags were to be scattered underneath the trees, and the contents of the others were to be spread over the putting greens, and the manager rested and refreshed himself with tea while this, as he thought, was being done, and he talked pleasantly to me of the various excellences of the course and the way in which difficulties of soil and situation had been conquered. And then there broke in upon us an emissary from the man who had been sowing the seed, who came to say, “Please, sir, there’s been a sort of accident happened, and it’s like as William has been and mistaken and gone and planted the putting green seed under them trees, and he’s planted the seed as’ll make the long grass on some of the putting greens. And we want to know, sir, what we must do!” What, indeed?

X

When October comes we bid her a very loyal and joyful welcome, for we have come to regard her as the queen of months for golf. No soul so serene as that of the golfer as he tees the ball on a bright October morning. It sometimes seems to us of the links that we are glad of every change in the seasons. When it is spring, we look forward to the coming of summer, and then we sigh for the autumn, and in turn are glad even to sink back to the adventures and trials of the heroic golf that we are called upon to play in the winter-time. And yet it is seldom through discontent that we thus anticipate the changing of the seasons, but rather that we, as golfers, do so highly appreciate the glorious variety which is afforded to us by the system of Nature. Constantly happy in our game, while we are playing it, the season is for the moment forgotten, and it is only in the intervals of holes or rounds that we are roused to the eternal transformation that is proceeding.

But there is nothing sweeter than the bright October morning on the links. A fragrant smell of moist earth rises up, and it is as if that very scent is a rare stimulant to the golfer after the heat of summer. There is a fine spring in the turf as we tread upon it, and, quite revelling in it, we find that we must needs go tripping light-heartedly along the links until the problems of the play at a couple of holes have sobered us down. We like even to see the dewdrops lingering on until starting time, taking advantage of the laggard autumnal sun. The film of mist that is hanging a few holes out, and the suspicion of a nip in the air, are fine. And then there are the glorious tints of autumn, the yellows and the crimsons and the browns, blended as only one Artist knows how to blend them, and, amidst the happiness of it all, the pathos of the scene comes in upon us as we listen to the faint crackle of falling leaves. The heart of every golfer is touched by all these changes, for whatever may have been his previous disposition and his tastes in life, each one becomes in time something of a Nature lover, and acquires a knowledge and interest in some of the simpler features of her work. For, of all games, golf is the game which is most closely allied with simple Nature. A little ball, a stick, a small hole, and the open country at her wildest and roughest, and there you have your golf. Then what is deeper than the soul’s content of the golfer when he finishes the afternoon round just as the red sun is dipping away to other lands, and by the time he and his clubs are cleaned, the twilight is already changing into the evening gloom, and the thing that it seems best to do is that which is one of the happiest in the golfer’s day, which is to sit by a bright fire and talk with one’s enemy of the links of all the good and the bad golf that has been played since the morning. Come night, we have had our day, and this talk by the fire, while the white mists gather again upon the links outside, is yet more cheering to the heart of the golfer than all the evenings of summer.