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And well it might, when a restless little rat was running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth, and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks off the window bolt as it shook in the breeze. No fielder inside the magic circle would be allowed to stop the ball with his feet. We don't want to plagiarize, although a rubber-cored cricket ball is a nice idea. A nice way to see this "butterfly effect" for yourself is with a game of pool or billiards. I watched a final match once in the amateur championship, in which two most distinguished amateurs were struggling for the mastery, and both drove and played through the green as well as could be desired, and both putted in a way that a charity-school boy would have been ashamed of. Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for rent in advance, and then, beyond my ear-shot, had beaten them with the big green umbrella whose use I could never before divine.

I very much doubt whether any player in England could truthfully say that all distances were alike to him, that he played equally well or equally badly at a shot that wanted a 180-yards knock or a thirty. He either cuts it too fine and is very short in the attempt to lay it dead, or else, frightened of the bunker that lies so dangerously near to him, what is billiards he determines to get over at all risks and overruns the green by forty or fifty yards. Any point on the diagonal of a square determines a smaller square. So embrace good sportsmanship and maintain a friendly atmosphere at the table. 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. He has lost some of his length, he cannot force a ball out of its bunker as he did formerly, and his eye is not quick at judging the distance of about eighty yards which he has to carry to get over some danger.

In putting, a man is generally so impressed by the fact that a reserve of strength is needful, that a contrary effect is produced, and he is nearly always short-nervousness in putting in nine cases out of ten makes a man hit too softly. 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, and his skill is overpowered by his nerves. 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. You cannot win a match if you approach and putt badly; but there are some courses, Sandwich, for instance, where you may just as well go home as dream of winning a match or making a respectable score if you are "off" your driving. 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.

The most common failing of such players is that they hit too hard; an easy stroke is one which will be succeeded by another easy stroke if the proper strength is applied, but the striker is afraid of missing the stroke and hits too hardy and the balls are scattered and the break lost. Professional players employ advanced strategies that can elevate your understanding of the game. To the huge majority of players there are one or more clubs in which they cannot affect to feel much confidence. 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. To ingenuous youth I observe that all these fads are absurd, and nobody who possesses any self-discipline need fall a victim to them. I have remarked before that to the golfer as he gets older there are compensating advantages to set off against the diminished power and length of the long strokes of the tee, and through the green. If a man is off his drive he nevertheless has to play with his driver or brassey off the tee, for to drive with a cleek is ignominious and fatiguing withal.