And, for my other essential of a country stick, it must be possible to grasp it by the wrong end and hit a ball with it.  So it must have no ferrule, and the handle must be heavy and straight.  In this way was golf born; its creator roamed the fields after his picnic lunch, knocking along the cork from his bottle.  At first he took seventy-nine from the gate in one field to the oak tree in the next; afterwards fifty-four.  Then suddenly he saw the game.  We cannot say that he w;is no lover of Nature.  The desire to knock a ball about, to play silly games with a stick, comes upon a man most keenly when he is happy; let it be ascribed that he is happy to the streams and the hedges and the sunlight through the trees.  And so let my stick have a handle heavy and straight, and let there be no ferrule on the end.  Be sure that I have an old golf ball in my pocket.

In London one is not so particular.  Chiefly we want a stick for leaning on when we are talking to an acquaintance suddenly met.  After the initial “Hulloa!” and the discovery that we have nothing else of importance to say, the situation is distinctly eased by the remembrance of our stick.  It gives us a support moral and physical, such as is supplied in a drawing-room by a cigarette.  For this purpose size and shape are immaterial.  Yet this much is essential—­it must not be too slippery, or in our nervousness we may drop it altogether.  My ebony stick with the polished ivory top—­

But I have already decided that my ebony stick is out of place with the everyday hat.  It stands in its corner waiting for the opera season, I must get another stick for rough work.

The Diary Habit

A newspaper has been lamenting the decay of the diary-keeping habit, with the natural result that several correspondents have written to say that they have kept diaries all their lives.  No doubt all these diaries now contain the entry, “Wrote to the Daily ——­ to deny the assertion that the diary-keeping habit is on the wane.”  Of such little things are diaries made.

I suppose this is the reason why diaries are so rarely kept nowadays—­that nothing ever happens to anybody.  A diary would be worth writing up if it could be written like this:—­

Monday.—­“Another exciting day.  Shot a couple of hooligans on my way to business and was forced to give my card to the police.  On arriving at the office was surprised to find the building on fire, but was just in time to rescue the confidential treaty between England and Switzerland.  Had this been discovered by the public, war would infallibly have resulted.  Went out to lunch and saw a runaway elephant in the Strand.  Thought little of it at the time, but mentioned it to my wife in the evening.  She agreed that it was worth recording.”