Ha, Mr. Caudle! I only wish I didn't know. I pity you, Caudle! I tell you, Caudle, a billiard-room's a place where ruin of all sorts is made easy, I may say, to the lowest understanding, so you can't miss it. If you don't want to talk yourself you can be as dumb as a drum with a hole in it, as Sam Weller says, and you may go farther, and forbid anybody to speak to you; but to stamp and swear because somebody within hearing distance of you chooses to talk to a friend is ridiculous and silly, partly because it is contemptible, and partly because, as you are not in a position to stop all conversation on the links, you must grin and bear it. We must congratulate ourselves that the glorious element of humour is never quite absent from golf, serious though the game and the Scotch nation be.

Unless the green is a private one the talker has as much right to be there and to laugh or talk as you have to play golf, and every player should try and keep this fact in mind. Such cases, however, are painfully common, and like Jorrocks, we can only implore ingenuous youth to try and avoid these pitfalls, and realise while still young and in the heyday of his success, that the inevitable hour must come sooner or later, and make it a duty to meet it with philosophic calm. A great player-I may say a very great player-once told me that he had been unable to drive off the tee to his satisfaction for no less a period than four years-this player must have been more than human if to a greater or less degree he was not during all that time in an important match troubled with nerves when he took his stand on the tee. Bert Atkins was to play a challenge match at billiards, and Mrs. Curtis was to attend a committee meeting of a woman's club. Don't tell me you'll not play! Of course, we could tell their nervousness and all, but hey, it's the Finals of the greatest show in the pool world!

Just tell me where you were on Tuesday? A man who foozles his drive and slices his approach, but who is nevertheless always down in two strokes after he has got on the putting-green, if not in one, is very hard to beat except his opponent is a really good player. It was close most of the way, and I made a few critical errors, but still won the match 7-5. I’m not sure how I did it, but all of a sudden from being down 0-4, then 3-6 in my first match and now I’m on the winner’s side on Sunday! From then on, what is billiards this match has been snookerpropriately referred to as the Blackball Finish. Then I broke and came up dry on the break and she ran that rack. I was feeling good at the beginning of the match and then my friend Monica came up to me and mentioned that my "other cleavage" (as she called it) was showing. 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.

I have seen a player who was bad at lofting a ball over a bunker forty yards from the hole, play the previous stroke short in order, instead of having to play a forty-yards shot, to make one that took eighty yards to get over the bunker. But yet the ordeal has to be faced, the stroke must be attempted when it comes, as it assuredly will in due course. We must not judge our friends harshly. Mark your calendars, friends! The bad-tempered golfer is a nuisance and anxiety to himself and his friends; indeed I have seen it come to such a pass that, though a man may have friends anywhere else, they are not to be found on the links. And I have seen lawns where only the masters and not the undergraduates may walk, and staircases where only the graduates and not the students may play billiards; I have seen professors in rabbits’ fur and cloaks as red as lobsters, I have seen the graduates kneel and kiss the hand of the Vice-Chancellor; of all these wonders I have been able to make a drawing only of one venerable college provost, who poured out for me a glass of sherry at least as old as the elder Pitt.