I contend, however, that it is not, because of the varying conditions of the greens and turf. At golf, however, it may be truly said that no one putting-green is exactly like any other-one is fast, another slow, one smooth, another uneven, one with one sort of turf, another with another. Set such a man on a putting-green with a putter and three or four balls, and he will very likely putt as well as the best professional; ask him to drive or play a brassey and he will be nowhere. I know perfectly well that a man may feel unutterably nervous before he goes in to bat at cricket, but his nervousness goes when he has scored twenty runs, and been in half-an-hour. Finally there is the case of billiards, not a game that is very closely allied to cricket, but one from which much may be learned. In one sense it was refreshing for an ordinary mortal to see great men fail in the way they did, for we could all flatter ourselves we could quote this instance as a proof of how hard putting was, when we failed ourselves.

And in this way one is unrestricted, and one has voluminous pockets in which all sorts of things can be put if necessary. If you watch an amateur billiard-player in a handicap before a crowd, you will soon see whether he is nervous by the way he judges the strength. Nerves appear to be absent one day and painfully present another: so there are red-letter days when even a nervous man can putt, but the more nervous a man is the worse will he putt, and in no other part of the game will he find nerves play such demoniacal tricks. In football you run your hardest and kick your hardest, and few spectators are much the wiser; and a nervous man can always hit hard at golf off the tee and through the green, for as he has not got to think of strength, what is billiards he is less likely to fidget and foozle the ball. We are all familiar with the huge strides that have been made by the introduction of the rubber-cored ball. It should have the best of everything. I have remarked before that to the golfer as he gets older there are compensating advantages to set off against the diminished power and length of the long strokes of the tee, and through the green.

He is on a smooth green which looks so fast that it terrifies him, while if it should slope slightly down hill he is more terrified still. He either cuts it too fine and is very short in the attempt to lay it dead, or else, frightened of the bunker that lies so dangerously near to him, he determines to get over at all risks and overruns the green by forty or fifty yards. If you can find a copy for sale, get it. Very well. The same principle can be easily adapted to our requirements in the form of the Three Batsmen System. Like "The lightning flashed." Well, obviously the flashing was the same as the lightning. Take your triangle rack and place it for the foot spot like you were going to rack the balls for 8-ball pool. To prove how much nerve is the first, second, and third necessity in putting, you may take a man of thirty years old who has been and perhaps still is a good cricketer, and has a good eye for games generally. These skills become very important when picking better quality locks, so take your time here. To be two yards beyond is far better than to be two yards short, for in the first place you give the ball a chance of holing, and in the second place it relieves the eye somewhat to turn round and putt along a different line.

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. One might put up a little hurdle-nothing obtrusive-only a matter of a few inches high. We believe that something might even be done by borrowing from hockey the principle of the semi-circle, outside of which a goal may not be shot. We propose to go one better, and draw up a schedule of the different conditions of barring under which matches may be played. The one who wins the break shot will choose whether to play with coloured or striped balls. Do you call ever shot in 8 ball? Ball and mallet games are mentioned as early as the 13th century in French texts. I have mentioned golf and billiards together as the two games that give the hardest test of nerve, and the reason is this, that in both games strength is the all-important matter: strokes that require calculation of strength want nerve, but frequently are played without it. Golf has also a lesson to teach us.