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. There is a nasty ditch to be negotiated. Many an
optimist has been reduced to blank pessimism by that ditch. "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 ball into its
very jaws. And then madness seized him. The merciful laws of golf,
framed by kindly men who do not wish to see the asylums of Great
Britain overcrowded, enact that in such a case the player may take his
ball and throw it over his shoulder. The same to count as one stroke.
But vaulting ambition is apt to try and drive out from the ditch,
thinking thereby to win through without losing a stroke. This way
madness lies.

It was a grisly sight to see the professor, head and shoulders above
the ditch, hewing at his obstinate Haskell.

"_Sixteen_!" said the professor at last between his teeth. Then,
having made one or two further comments, he stooped and picked up his
ball.

"I give you this hole," he said.

We walked on.

I won the seventh hole.

I won the eighth hole.

The ninth we halved, for in the black depth of my soul I had formed a
plan of fiendish subtlety. I intended to allow him to win--with
extreme labor--eight holes in succession.

Then, when hope was once more strong in him, I would win the last, and
he would go mad.

* * * * *

I watched him carefully as we trudged on. Emotions chased one another
across his face. When he won the tenth hole he merely refrained from
oaths. When he won the eleventh a sort of sullen pleasure showed in
his face. It was at the thirteenth that I detected the first dawning
of hope. From then onward it grew. When, with a sequence of shocking
shots, he took the seventeenth hole in eight, he was in a parlous
condition. His run of success had engendered within him a desire for
conversation. He wanted, as it were, to flap his wings and crow. I
could see dignity wrestling with talkativeness.

I gave him a lead.

"You have got back your form now," I said.

Talkativenes