g period, resulted in a permanent injury to my game as played at
home, and in the light of reflection and experience I am persuaded to
think that this is so. I have played well since then, have felt equal to
doing anything that I ever did before, and have indeed won the
Championship, but I think I left a very small fraction of my game in the
United States.

In the way of other novel experiences I might mention that on one
occasion I played as "Mr. Jones." I wanted a quiet day, and did not wish
a too attentive public to know where I was. Three friends joined me in a
foursome, but when we went into the club-house after our game, another
anxious golfer went up to my partner when I was standing by, and
inquired of him whether he had heard that Vardon was playing on the
links. My friend declared that he knew nothing of such a rumour, and I
could hardly refrain from laughter as the anxious one went to pursue his
inquiries in other quarters. Another time two other professionals and
myself visited a course where we were unknown, and, hiding our identity,
pretended that we were novices at the game, and begged of our caddies to
advise us as to the best manner of playing each shot, which they did
accordingly. We deliberately duffed most of our strokes at several
holes, but this course of procedure tired us immensely, and so at last
we abandoned it and began to play our natural game. Imagine the
consternation and the indignation of those caddies! Each one of them
threw down his bag of clubs, and, declining to carry them for another
hole, walked sulkily off the course. On one occasion we camped out for
the night on the links on which we were playing, and a very pleasant
variation from the ordinary routine we found it.

The American newspapers, to which I have frequently referred, do their
golf reporting very well. Their journalism may be "sensational" or
whatever you like to call it, but the golfing section of it was usually
interesting, ingenious, and very intelligent and reliable. On the
occasion of one match in which I played, a paper gave up nearly the
whole of one of its pages to a large panoramic view of the links. The
flight of my ball and that of my opponent, and the places where they
stopped after every stroke, from the first to the last, were accurately
marked. Thus the whole game was illustrated in a single picture in a
very effective manner. As was inevitable, I was sometimes victimised by
interviewers who wrote "interv