"Anything you want for lunch you can have, my dear Thomas. I promise you that you shall not be stinted. The next green is below sea-level altogether, I'm afraid. The first in the water wins."
Honours, it turned out, were divided. I lost the hole, and Thomas lost his ball. The third tee having disappeared, we moved on to the fourth.
"There's rather a nasty place along here," I said.
"The Secretary was sucked in the other day, and only rescued by the hair."
Thomas drove a good one. I topped mine badly, and it settled down in the mud fifty yards off. "Excuse me," I shouted as I ran quickly after it, and I got my niblick on to it just as it was disappearing. It was a very close thing.
"Well," said Thomas, as he reached his ball, "that's not what I call a brassy lie."
"It's what we call a corkscrew lie down here," I explained. "If you haven't got a corkscrew, you'd better dig round it with something, and then when the position is thoroughly undermined—Oh, good shot!"
Thomas had got out of the fairway in one, but he still seemed unhappy.
"My eye," he said, bending down in agony; "I've got about half
Middlesex in it."
He walked round in circles saying strange nautical things, and my suggestions that he should (1) rub the other eye, and (2) blow his nose suddenly, were received ungenerously.