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If you dislike long losing hazards, you must and can try and play the cannon and potting game at the top of the table; if you hate those strokes, because you cannot do them, play an open game and go in for losing hazards from baulk. The table is open after the break shot and remains open until the shooter pockets balls from only one group on a legal normal shot, which means not a break shot and not a free shot. The referee will place a ball on each side of the table behind the head string and near the head string. 2) taking cue ball in hand behind the head string. The shooter is not penalized for shooting while a ball is settling. Such cases, however, are painfully common, and like Jorrocks, we can only implore ingenuous youth to try and avoid these pitfalls, and realise while still young and in the heyday of his success, that the inevitable hour must come sooner or later, and make it a duty to meet it with philosophic calm.

To ingenuous youth I observe that all these fads are absurd, and nobody who possesses any self-discipline need fall a victim to them. It is advisable that nobody should stand behind a man's club when he hits the ball, but even this, I feel convinced, a man can get accustomed to, if he will only apply his mind to it. Unless the green is a private one the talker has as much right to be there and to laugh or talk as you have to play golf, and every player should try and keep this fact in mind. One great value of games is that they are the finest discipline for the temper. Driving off the tee for the majority of players is, I should say, on the whole the stroke where less foozling or bad play takes place than in any other stroke, and yet here is the case of a great player failing at it for four years, when he was very near the prime of life. A great player-I may say a very great player-once told me that he had been unable to drive off the tee to his satisfaction for no less a period than four years-this player must have been more than human if to a greater or less degree he was not during all that time in an important match troubled with nerves when he took his stand on the tee.

I have seen a player who was bad at lofting a ball over a bunker forty yards from the hole, play the previous stroke short in order, instead of having to play a forty-yards shot, what is billiards to make one that took eighty yards to get over the bunker. Take a stroke of eighty yards and one of forty, the mashie or some sort of lofted iron would be used for both these shots; and yet a player knows that at one distance he has a good chance of making a good stroke, at the other distance his heart goes into his boots. But Mr. Hilton has to take out an iron club, because there are some occasions when it is absolutely impossible to use any other club. Players take turns using the snooker cue to hit the white ball, in order to pot a red ball. I have heard it said that Goethe used to go to the top of a tower every day in order to accustom himself to look down without growing giddy. The bad-tempered golfer is a nuisance and anxiety to himself and his friends; indeed I have seen it come to such a pass that, though a man may have friends anywhere else, they are not to be found on the links.

A golfer by practice may improve his play with a club, but he very likely will find that, during the time he has occupied himself with this club, another has mysteriously failed him; and in any case the terrible ordeal of putting has to be gone through, and it is the painful experience of bad putters that practice does by no means perfect, but only causes new terrors to appear. 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. At Sandwich, therefore, you can with truth remark that the match cannot be won by the bad driver. It has been said, that every match is won by the short game; this, like many much-quoted sayings, is a half-truth. But he is somewhat pachydermatous and case-hardened when he gets on the green, and it is astonishing what a difference a deadly long putt can make in the fortunes of a match.