“Ye’re no standing richt.  Ye haud yer hands wrang.  Ye tak’ yer ee off the ba’.  Ye’re ower quick up.  Ye’re ower slow doun.  Ye dinna swing.  Ye fa’ back.  Ye haud ower ticht wi’ yer richt hand.  Ye dinna let your arms gang easy.  Ye whiles tap, and whiles slice, and whiles heel, or ye hit her aff the tae.  Ye’re hooking her.  Ye’re no thinking o’ what ye’re doing.  Ye’ll never be a Gowfer.  Lord! ony man can lairn Greek, but Gowf needs a heid.”

Here are fifteen ways of going wrong, and there is only one way of going right!  Fifteen things to think of, every time you take a driver in hand.  And, remember, that is not nearly all.  These fifteen fatal errors apply to long driving.  You may (or at least I may, and do) make plenty of other blunders with the other weapons.  Say the ball lies in sand—­“a bunker,” technically.  If you hit it whack on the top, it disappears in a foot-mark.  If you “tak’ plenty o’ sand,” why, you get plenty of sand in your mouth, your eyes, down the back of your neck, and the ball is no forwarder.  If you strike her quite clean, she goes like a bullet against the face of the bunker, soars in the air, falls on your head, and you lose the hole!  Oh, Golf is full of bitterness!

Suppose we play a round.  The ball is neatly “tee’d” on a patch of sand.  I approach, I shuffle with my feet for a secure footing, I waggle my club in an airy manner.  Then I take it up and whack it down.  A variety of things may occur.  I may smite the top of the hall, when it runs on for twenty yards and lies in a rut on the road.  I may hit her on the heel of the club, when she spins, with much “cut” on, into the sea.  I may hit her with the toe of the club, when she soars to square leg, and perhaps breaks a window.  I used to try running in at the ball, as if it were a half-volley at Cricket, but that way lies madness.  However, suppose that, in a lucid interval (as will happen), I hit her clean.  She soars away, and falls within forty yards of a meandering burn.  The hole, the haven where one would be, is beyond the burn.

I seize a cleek or an iron, it turns in my hand, cuts up the turf, and the ball rolls half a dozen feet.  My opponent has crossed the burn.  I try again; a fearful misdirected shot; the ball soars over the burn and lands in a road behind the hole.  There is no hitting out of this road, or, if one does hit a desperate blow, the ball lands in an eccentric sand-hole, called the Scholar’s Bunker.  We start for the next hole. Meme jeu! Now we are in the gorse, now among the Station Master’s potatoes, now in the railway, where all hope may be abandoned, now in bunkers many, now missing the ball altogether, when you feel as if your arms had flown off.  As for “putting” the short strokes on the green, near the hole, if I hit sharp, the ball runs over the hole yards and yards beyond, or if I hit mild, it stops with an air of plaintive resignation, after dribbling for a foot or two.  And the worst of it is that, sometimes, you will play as well as another for half-a-dozen holes.  Then one thinks one has The Secret!  But it falls from us, vanishes, we are topping and slicing, and heeling, and missing again as sorrily as ever.