at noon on July
27th, on the evenings of August 2nd, 9th, 15th, and 21st, at 11:15
A.M. on Labor Day, again Labor Day evening, on September 19th, 23rd,
30th, and October 3rd, 11th and 18th. I am writing this in
mid-January, when the drifts are piled five feet deep over our
bunkers, and the water-carries are frozen solid. I have played my last
game of golf. The coming season I shall devote to the intensive
cultivation of my garden. The links have no allure for me.

"And if," says my wife, "I could believe that, I should be happier
than ever before in the long years of my golf widowhood."

"But you can," I answer, with grieved surprise.

She looks at me, with that superior and tolerant smile women know so
well how to assume.

"You men are all such children!" is her, it seems to me, somewhat
irrelevant retort.

I fell to musing on my friend, the noted war correspondent (now a
Major in the United States Army in France). All things considered, he
was the most consistent, or perhaps I should say persistent, quitter
the game of golf has ever known. He used to quit forever on an average
of three times a week, and I have known him to abandon the game twice
during a round, which is something of a record. He played every summer
on our beautiful Berkshire course, which crosses and recrosses the
winding Housatonic, not to mention sundry swamps, and boasts the most
luxuriant fairway, and by the same token the rankest rough, in all
America. It is the course Owen Johnson once immortalized in his story,
_Even Threes_.

How well I remember that peaceful, happy May, back in 1914! Our course
had emerged from its annual spring flood, newly top-dressed with rich
river silt, and a few warm days brought the turf through the scars and
made the whole glorious expanse of fairway, winding through the silver
willows, a velvet carpet. I had given my orders to the greens-keepers,
and gone to New York for a day or two--reluctantly, of course--and
there met the famous war correspondent, in those peaceful times out of
a regular job and turned novelist _pro tem_. He had just relieved
himself of his final chapter, and readily yielded to my persuasions to
return with me to the velvet field and the whistling drive. We
"entrained," as he would say in one of his military dispatches.

As far as the Massachusetts-Connecticut state-line he talked of
Mexican revolutions, Theodore Roosevelt, Japanese art, _vers libre_,
mushrooms, and such other topics as