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Some holes are in a sort of pot, which, though small just where the hole is, nevertheless has widely expanding sides, and you probably will find your ball dead if you get it into it at all from any distance; but another is on a table-land, where the chief difficulty is not to get the ball on the table-land but to keep it there. A funeral is not an exciting or particularly pleasant occupation, but there are many funerals where a dead silence is not more cultivated than at some golf matches; and it is stupid and useless to fly into a passion because somebody thirty or forty yards off who is not playing golf at all, or at any rate has nothing to do with you, talks or laughs so that you must hear him. It is trying perhaps to find oneself beaten by youths, who a few years before used to touch their caps to you, and you presented with a third; but it is odd that everybody does not realise that this development is inevitable, and should therefore have come naturally and not as a violent surprise. In billiards it is equally true to say that only a few men play equally well at different shots, the long losing hazard or the long winner, the screw, follow on, &c.; but at billiards it is far easier to regulate and engineer your game so as to avoid having to attempt a stroke you cannot play.

The man of thirty in a few years will very likely develop into a really bad putter, not because he has not the skill-for he proved his skill when a beginner-but because he has learnt the terrors of putting, what is billiards and his skill is overpowered by his nerves. The hideous feeling of discomfort that comes over a player when he has topped his ball and made a deep hole in it, the terrible persistency with which ball after ball is sliced, the missing of one or two really short putts, the bad luck that attends him when putting really well, the way the hole is missed by a tenth of an inch, the frequent bad lies-all these combine to make life a burden. And I have seen lawns where only the masters and not the undergraduates may walk, and staircases where only the graduates and not the students may play billiards; I have seen professors in rabbits’ fur and cloaks as red as lobsters, I have seen the graduates kneel and kiss the hand of the Vice-Chancellor; of all these wonders I have been able to make a drawing only of one venerable college provost, who poured out for me a glass of sherry at least as old as the elder Pitt.

But putting has to be gone through every hole, and no golfer exists who does not know that putting is more than half a matter of nerve and nerve only. In a long hole of over four hundred yards, the golfer need not bother his head about strength for the first two strokes; he has to hit both these as hard as he can-there is no nice calculation of less or more. I have played at many games, but golf is played by more faddists than have been returned to the House of Commons during the past ten years. Just like with most games, the player or team with the highest score wins. Another way to score is by hitting the red ball first and then one cue ball for two points. "It was a great way to finish my Masters," said Love, who scored 73 and had an 11-over total.

Mr. Hilton, who has twice won the Championship, has said somewhere that he uses wooden clubs, brasseys, and spooned wooden clubs of sorts all through the green simply because he is absolutely unable to use iron clubs and play a champion's game with them. There are some tempers which Satan must have had a hand in forming, and if others are fortunately not afflicted in the same way, they must remember that golf is a very irritating game. We all admire the gentlemanlike courtesy with which some accept their fate, and play with some opponent of about the same age, or in congenial foursomes; but how painful, and yet how humorous is the sight of a man who under similar circumstances becomes irritable, fussy, fidgety, a pitiful sight to men and angels. The business of offering sympathy had been reduced to a system by the civilisation which these ladies helped to maintain; and, as it happened, there was one present who was familiar with this system. Then there is a third one which is the oldest, a fourth one distinguished for scholarship, a fifth for athletic records, a sixth because it has the finest chapel, a seventh for I know not what, and as there are at least fifteen of them, I have mixed them all up; I see only the castellated palaces in Perpendicular style, the huge quadrangles, where the pupils move about in black gowns and square tasselled caps, each of whom has his two or three rooms in the wings of these castles; I see the Gothic chapels disembowelled by Protestantism, the banquet-halls with a dais for the "masters" and "fellows," the venerable smoked portraits of earls, statesmen and poets, who went forth from there; I see the renowned "backs," i.e. the rear of the colleges above the river Cam, over which there are bridges leading to the ancient college parks; I float on the gentle river between the "backs" and the parks, and I think of our students, of their hollow bellies and their boots down-at-heel with trudging from lecture to lecture.