e than one ball is used at a time, action inimical
to the interests of the opponent's ball is permitted and encouraged.
Indeed in the good old days of yore, when croquet was not so strictly
scientific, a shrewd sudden stroke--the ankle shot, we called it, for,
after all, the fellow was probably not wearing boots--well, I daresay
you remember it; and I have once succeeded in paralysing the enemy's
cue arm with the red; but this needs a lot of luck as well as
strength, and is not a stroke to be practised by the beginner,
especially on public tables.

We come then again to golf, and see at once that, with the miserable
and cowardly exception of laying the stymie, there is no stroke in
this game that fulfils the proper conditions which should govern
athletic contests involving the use of spherical objects with or
without instruments of percussion.

And yet we read column after column about fierce encounters and
desperate struggles between old antagonists, when as a matter of fact
there is no struggle, no encounter at all. Against no other ball game
but golf, unless perhaps it be roulette, can this accusation be laid.
Ask a man what happened last Saturday. "I went out," he says, rather
as if he was the British Expeditionary Force, "in 41; but I came
home"--he smiles triumphantly; you see the hospital ship, the cheering
crowds--"in 39." Whether he beat the other fellow or not he hardly
remembers, because there was in fact no particular reason why the
other fellow should have been there.

Golf matches ought to be arranged, and for my part I shall arrange
them in future, as follows:--

_He._ Can you play on Saturday at Crump?

_I._ No, I'm not playing this week.

_He._ Next week then?

_I._ Yes, at Blimp.

_He._ I can't come to Blimp.

_I._ Well, let's play all the same. Your score this week at Crump
against mine next week at Blimp, and we'll have five bob on it.

I'm not quite sure what his retort is, but you take my point. It
is manifestly absurd to drag the psychological element into this
cold-blooded mathematical pursuit. After all that England has done and
come through in the last few years, is a man in baggy knickerbockers,
with tufts on the ends of his garters, going to be daunted and foiled
just because a man in slightly baggier knickerbockers and with
slightly larger tufts on his garters has hit a small white pellet a
little further than he has? Hardly, I think.

That is why, when I read long letters in