go
considerable change, and it is easier to lengthen a hole at this stage
of the proceedings, by simply placing the tee further back, than it will
be afterwards.

It has been a great question with some committees of newly-established
clubs or of older ones in search of new courses, as to whether, in
laying out their greens and settling upon the location of all their nice
new bunkers, they should keep more particularly in mind the excellences
of the scratch player or the trials and troubles of the 12 to 18
handicap men. On the one hand, the scratch player is the experienced
golfer, the man who plays the true game as it should be played, and who
finds no real enjoyment in so-called golf wherein he is never called
upon to do more than tap the ball over an obstacle ninety or a hundred
yards in front. Such links never put up a fight against him, and he
finishes his listless round with something as near to the sense of
weariness as it is possible for the golfer ever to experience. But these
scratch players, in common with the men with all handicaps up to 5 or 6,
are in a very heavy and hopeless minority in most clubs to-day. The bulk
of the membership is made up of players of from 6 to 24, with a
concentration of forces between 12 and 18. These men say, or at all
events think, that as they run the club they have a right to be
considered, and in their hearts the committee believe that they are
justified. These men with long handicaps--some of whom have not even a
desire to reduce them to any considerable extent, deriving the utmost
pleasure in playing the game in their own way--can find no fun in being
always and inevitably in the same bunkers, and regard driving from a
tee, when they are either obliged to play short deliberately with an
iron or be bunkered for a certainty with their driver, as the most
dismal occupation with which a Saturday or Sunday sportsman could ever
be afflicted. Therefore they cry loudly for shorter carries. They say
the others are not fair, and from their particular point of view the
remark is possibly justified. Even the young golfer who is determined to
be a scratch man some day, though he is eighteen strokes from that
pinnacle of excellence as yet, becomes rather tired in the long run of
finding constant punishment waiting upon his valiant attempts to drive
his longest ball, and thinks the committee should be reminded that there
are others in the world besides the immediately coming champions. Amid