He was silent, and I went on.

“On a billiard table your ball is always within easy reach.  You stand on a level floor and play on a level table.  In golf your ball never lands in the same place twice.  It may be above you, or below you.  It may lie in any one of ten million separate conformations of ground, and for each you must exercise judgment.  Your clubs change in weight as you clean them; no two golf balls have the same degree of elasticity when new, and as you use them it decreases.  But more than all else, you are not the same man physically or mentally on any two days.  A slight increase in weight, the wearing of an extra garment, the congestion of a muscle or the stiffening of a chord may be sufficient to throw you off your stroke and seriously impair your game.”

“Nonsense; I don’t believe it,” he declared.  “When I once find out how to make a certain shot I will keep right on improving until I have it perfect.”

“If that were possible golf would lose its charm,” I said.  “A man will go on making a certain shot with almost perfect accuracy for months, and all at once lose the knack of it, and not be able to recover it for months, and perhaps never.  In order to hit a golf ball accurately there are scores of muscles which must act in perfect accord, and the several parts of the body must maintain certain positions during the various parts of the stroke.  If the shoulder drops the quarter of an inch, if the heel rises too soon by the minutest fraction of a second, if either hand grasping the club turns in any degree the stroke is ruined.  You will hit the ball, but it will not go the distance or the direction required.”

“Must be a mighty hard game, from all that you say,” he laughed, grimly.  “Guess I’d better go back and not try it, but I notice that there was nothing the matter with the position of my muscles, cords, hands and the rest of my anatomy the other day when I whacked that ball out of sight.  And I can do it again, Smith, and don’t you forget it.”

I preferred to await the arbitrament of events so far as that boast was concerned.

We had arrived at the eighteenth tee, and he looked over the field with much satisfaction.  The railroad embankment is about one hundred and fifty yards from the tee, and few try to carry it.  The old post road runs parallel to the line of this hole, and forms the western boundary of the Woodvale links.  There is no bunker save the railroad bank for the entire distance, and it is an ideal hole for the golf “slugger.”

“Where is the green?” asked Harding, standing on the elevated tee.  I pointed in the line of the old church belfry, and after a long look he declared that he could see the white flag floating from the standard.

“Nobody ever drove it, you say?” he observed, throwing his shoulders back.

“Of course not,” I laughed, and added, “and never will.”

“Don’t be too sure about that,” he said, piling a mound of sand.  “It’s nothing more than a ‘putt,’ as you call it, to bat a ball over that railroad.”