shall pick my ball up," he growled.

We walked on in silence to the second tee. He did the second hole in
four, which was good. I did it in three, which--unfortunately for
himy--was better.

I won the third hole.

I won the fourth hole.

I won the fifth hole.

I glanced at my opponent out of the corner of my eyes. The man was
suffering. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead.

His play had become wilder and wilder at each hole in arithmetical
progression. If he had been a plough he could hardly have turned up
more soil. The imagination recoiled from the thought of what he could
be doing in another half-hour if he deteriorated at his present speed.

A feeling of calm and content stole over me. I was not sorry for him.
All the viciousness of my nature was uppermost in me. Once, when he
missed the ball clean at the fifth tee, his eye met mine, and we stood
staring at each other for a full half-minute without moving. I believe,
if I had smiled then, he would have attacked me without hesitation.
There is a type of golfer who really almost ceases to be human under
stress of the wild agony of a series of foozles.

The sixth hole involves the player in a somewhat tricky piece of
cross-country work, owing to the fact that there is a nasty ditch to be
negotiated some fifty yards from the green. It is a beast of a ditch,
which, if you are out of luck, just catches your second shot. "All hope
abandon ye who enter here" might be written on a notice board over it.

The professor entered there. The unhappy man sent his second, as nice
and clean a brassey shot as he had made all day, into its very jaws.
And then madness seized him. A merciful local rule, framed by kindly
men who have been in that ditch themselves, enacts that in such a case
the player may take his ball and throw it over his shoulder, losing a
stroke. But once, so the legend runs, a scratch man who found himself
trapped, scorning to avail himself of this rule at the expense of its
accompanying penalty, wrought so shrewdly with his niblick that he not
only got out but actually laid his ball dead: and now optimists
sometimes imitate his gallantry, though no one yet has been able to
imitate his success.

The professor decided to take a chance: and he failed miserably. As I
was on the green with my third, and, unless I putted extremely poorly,
was morally certain to be down in five, which is bogey for the hole,
there was not much practical use in his co