ontemptuously into a convenient ditch.

Of course much of this sort of thing is due to nervousness, and there
is no game in which full control of the nerves and extreme coolness are
more necessary than in golf. Let the player be as keen as he likes--the
keener the better--but if he is apt to become too anxious at the
critical stage of a round or match, he is not the man who will ever win
prizes in great competitions. He who is the most composed when in
difficulties and when the game is going against him, and who treats each
fresh trouble as it comes along as a part of the ordinary day's work to
be surmounted in the best manner possible, is the player who will most
frequently come out the conqueror. In many cases the tendency to fall
into a highly nervous state at the smallest provocation will disappear
with time and lengthening experience. Each year of golf should bring
increasing steadiness, and the steadier a golfer becomes the more
frequently will he do his best scores when they are most wanted. And so
I must leave it to time and practice and the proper cultivation of the
best methods to bring the ambitious beginner along into the front rank
of his contemporaries. But still there are some useful hints which I may
offer him and which may facilitate his progress towards the acquisition
of medals and cups.

To begin with, there is a little sermon to be preached on that torn
card. "Nil desperandum" should always be the motto of the competition
player, and it is a motto that will probably pay better in golf than in
any other game. I think it is very likely that some scores of monthly
medals have been lost through a too precipitate destruction of the
scoring card when everything seemed to be going the wrong way. Every
player should remember that it is indeed a perfect card that is without
a blemish, and that on the other hand there are few rounds played by a
man who knows anything about the game that are bad all through. But some
men, because they have the misfortune to be debited with a couple of 8's
in the first four or five holes, forthwith give up the ghost and rend
their cards into small pieces with many and varied expressions of
disgust. Thereafter they play well, and at the conclusion of the match
are inclined to think that they were rather in too much of a hurry to be
out of the competition in its early stages. If they had made a fine card
for fourteen or fifteen holes from the beginning, they might have taken
two