an
iron cannot reach them.

There is great diversity in irons, and the player may be left in the
first place in the hands of his professional adviser, and afterwards to
his own taste, with the single hint from me that undue lightness should
at all times be avoided. Of the two mashies which the complete golfer
will carry out with him on to the links, one, for pitching the ball well
up with very little run to follow, will have a deep face, will be of
medium weight, and be very stiff in the shaft. I emphasise the deep face
and the rigidity of the shaft. This mashie will also have plenty of loft
upon it. The other one, for use chiefly in running up to the hole, will
have a straighter face, but will otherwise be much the same. However,
not all golfers consider two mashies to be necessary, and I myself
depend chiefly upon one. Of the niblick it need only be said that it
must be strong, heavy, and well lofted.

I have stated that the golfer may carry two putters in his bag; but I
mean that he should do so only when he has a definite and distinct
purpose for each of them, and I certainly do not advise his going from
one kind to the other for the same sort of putt. There is great danger
in such a practice. If he is doing very poor putting with one club, he
will naturally fly for help to the other one, and the probability is
that he will do just as badly with that. Then he returns to the first
one, and again finds that his putts do not come off, and by this time he
is in a hopeless quandary. If he has only one putter he will generally
make some sort of a success of it if he can putt at all, and my private
belief is that the putter itself has very little to do with the way in
which a golfer putts. It is the man that counts and not the tool. I have
tried all kinds of putters in my time, and have generally gone back to
the plainest and simplest of all. I have occasionally used the aluminium
putter. It has much to recommend it to those who like this style of
implement, and Braid always does very well with it. The Travis or
Schenectady putter, which was so popular for a short time after the
Amateur Championship last year, owing to the American player having done
such wonderful things with it, I do not succeed with. When I try to putt
with it I cannot keep my eye away from its heel. But the fact is, as I
have already indicated, that you can putt with anything if you hit the
ball properly. Everything depends on that--hitting the ball