cord of a father adopting this attitude
in dismissing a suitor.

"You may not!" he cried. "You may consider no such thing. My objections
were never more absolute. You detain me in the water, sir, till I am
blue, sir, blue with cold, in order to listen to the most preposterous
and impudent nonsense I ever heard."

This was unjust. If he had listened attentively from the first and
avoided interruptions and had not behaved like a submarine we should
have got through the business in half the time.

I said so.

"Don't talk to me, sir," he replied, hobbling off to his dressing-tent.
"I will not listen to you. I will have nothing to do with you. I
consider you impudent, sir."

"I assure you it was unintentional."

"Isch!" he said--being the first occasion and the last on which I have
ever heard that remarkable monosyllable proceed from the mouth of a
man. And he vanished into his tent.

"Laddie," said Ukridge solemnly, "do you know what I think?"

"Well?"

"You haven't clicked, old horse!" said Ukridge.

CHAPTER XX

SCIENTIFIC GOLF

People are continually writing to the papers--or it may be one solitary
enthusiast who writes under a number of pseudonyms--on the subject of
sport, and the over-doing of the same by the modern young man. I recall
one letter in which "Efficiency" gave it as his opinion that if the
Young Man played less golf and did more drill, he would be all the
better for it. I propose to report my doings with the professor on the
links at some length, in order to refute this absurd view. Everybody
ought to play golf, and nobody can begin it too soon. There ought not
to be a single able-bodied infant in the British Isles who has not
foozled a drive. To take my case. Suppose I had employed in drilling
the hours I had spent in learning to handle my clubs. I might have
drilled before the professor by the week without softening his heart. I
might have ported arms and grounded arms and presented arms, and
generally behaved in the manner advocated by "Efficiency," and what
would have been the result? Indifference on his part, or--and if I
overdid the thing--irritation. Whereas, by devoting a reasonable
portion of my youth to learning the intricacies of golf I was enabled...

It happened in this way.

To me, as I stood with Ukridge in the fowl-run in the morning following
my maritime conversation with the professor, regarding a hen that had
posed before us, obviously with a view to inspection, the