d Sharon, concealing his amazement. He could
no longer address as Sandy one who earned two dollars as lightly as
this.

There was a spacious opening back of the stable on the Whipple Old
Place--space and the seclusion which Sharon Whipple considered
imperative. Even Elihu Titus was sent about his business when he came to
observe; threatened with an instant place in the ranks of the unemployed
if he so much as breathed of the secret lessons to a town now said to be
composed of snickering busybodies. The open space immediately back of
the stable gave on wider spaces of pasture and wood lot.

CHAPTER XI

Archaeologists of a future age will doubtless, in their minute
explorations of this region, come upon the petrified remains of golf
balls in such number as will occasion learned dispute. Found so
profusely and yet so far from any known course, they will perhaps give
rise to wholly erroneous surmises. Prefacing his paper with a reference
to lost secrets once possessed by other ancients, citing without doubt
that the old Egyptians knew how to temper the soft metal of copper, a
certain scientist will profoundly deduce from this deposit of balls, far
from the vestiges of the nearest course, that people of this remote day
possessed the secret of driving a golf ball three and a half miles, and
he will perhaps moralize upon the degeneracy of his own times, when the
longest drive will doubtless not exceed a scant mile.

For three days Sharon sprayed out over the landscape, into ideal
golf-ball covert, where many forever eluded even the keen eyes of Wilbur
Cowan, one hundred balls originally purchased by the selecter golfing
set of Newbern. Hereupon he refused longer to regard the wooden driver
as a possible instrument of precision, and forever renounced it. Elihu
Titus heard him renounce it balefully in the harness room one late
afternoon, and later entering that apartment found the fragments of a
shattered driver.

It remained for Wilbur Cowan to bring Sharon into the game by another
avenue. A new campaign was entered upon, doubtfully at first by Sharon,
at length with dawning confidence. He was never to touch a wooden club.
He was to drive with an iron, not far, but truly; to stay always in the
centre of the fairway and especially to cultivate the shorter approach
shots and the use of the putter. The boy laboured patiently with his
pupil, striving to persuade him that golf was more than a trial of
strength. From se