do, and no golfer is at
liberty to blame the clubmaker for his own incapacity on the links,
though it may frequently happen that his choice and taste in the matter
of his golfing goods are at fault. There are many varieties of every
class of iron clubs, and their gradations of weight, of shape, of loft,
and of all their other features, are delicate almost to the point of
invisibility; but the old golfer who has an affection for a favourite
club knows when another which he handles differs from it to the extent
of a single point in these gradations. Some golfers have spent a
lifetime in the search for a complete set of irons, each one of which
was exactly its owner's ideal, and have died with their task still
unaccomplished. Happy then is the player who in his early days has irons
over all of which he has obtained complete mastery, and which he can
rely upon to do their duty, and do it well, when the match is keen and
their owner is sorely pressed by a relentless opponent.

First of these iron clubs give me the cleek, the most powerful and
generally useful of them all, though one which is much abused and often
called hard names. If you wish, you may drive a very long ball with a
cleek, and if the spirit moves you so to do you may wind up the play at
the hole by putting with it too. But these after all are what I may call
its unofficial uses, for the club has its own particular duties, and for
the performance of them there is no adequate substitute. Therefore, when
a golfer says, as misguided golfers sometimes do, that he cannot play
with the cleek, that he gets equal or superior results with other clubs,
and that therefore he has abandoned it to permanent seclusion in the
locker, you may shake your head at him, for he is only deceiving
himself. Like the wares of boastful advertisers, there is no other which
is "just as good," and if a golfer finds that he can do no business with
his cleek, the sooner he learns to do it the better will it be for his
game.

And there are many different kinds of cleeks, the choice from which is
to a large extent to be regulated by experiment and individual fancy.
Some men fancy one type, and some another, and each of them obtains
approximately the same result from his own selection, but it is natural
that a driving cleek, which is specially designed for obtaining length,
having a fairly straight face and plenty of weight, will generally
deliver the ball further than those which are more lof