Miss Harding insisted in trying to drive over the pond on the fourth hole, and said she would gladly pay for all the balls that went into it, but of course I would not listen to that.  The pond is very shallow at this season of the year, and in fact is a mud hole in most places, and it is therefore impossible to recover a ball which fails to carry less than eighty yards.

She barely touched the ball on her first attempt, and I got it after wading in the mud to my shoe tops.  Then she hit it nicely, but it failed to carry the pond by a few yards, and disappeared in the ooze.

“I thought I could do it, but I give it up,” she said, and I could see that she was disappointed.

“Try it again,” I insisted, teeing up a new one.  “Keep your eye on the ball when your club comes down, and don’t press.”

She made a brave effort, but hit the ball a trifle on top.  It struck the water, ricochetted and eventually poised itself on a mud bank.  I recall how white it looked against the black slime with lily pads in the background, but I saw at a glance that it would remain there, so far as we were concerned.

[Illustration:  “We rested on top of the hill”]

Against her protest I teed another ball, but she went under it and it met the fate of its predecessors.  It took all my eloquence to induce her to make the five attempts which followed, and then I made the discovery that I had brought only eight new balls with me.  So I excused myself and went back to the club house and bought a box of a dozen, but nothing would change her determination not to try it again.

I am firmly convinced that with a little luck she could have done it, but it was the first time Miss Harding had played this course, and that makes lots of difference.

Of the various incidents in this most delightful game nothing gave me more keen enjoyment than when Miss Harding played Carter’s ball.  It was by mistake, of course.  Nature has implanted in woman an instinct which leads her to play any ball rather than her own.  The ball thus selected is generally without a blemish, and it has been ordained that a weak little creature can with one stroke cut that sphere in halves.

That is what happened to Carter’s ball when Miss Harding played it by mistake, and I never laughed more heartily.  Carter smiled and bowed and pretended to be amused, but I knew he was not.

We rested on top of the hill after this exploit and talked of the rare view and of other topics which had nothing whatever to do with golf.  Never before have I rested during a game, and I did not think it possible.  I have been on that hill innumerable times, but it never occurred to me to take more than a passing glance at the inspiring vista which spreads away to the north and west.

We talked of poetry and of art.  Think of sitting with a golf club in your hand, resting a few rods from a tee where a clean shot will carry the railway tracks a hundred feet below and land your ball on a green two hundred and eighty yards from the tee—­it is one of the finest holes in the country—­think of idling an hour away on the most perfect golf afternoon you ever saw, and repeating line after line of verse descriptive of “meadows green and sylvan shades,” and all that sort of thing!