Hints to Pilgrims

by Charles S. Brooks

Once our course was not beset with sandpits. In those bright days woods and gulley were enough. Once clear of the initial obstruction I could roll up unimpeded to the green. I practiced a bouncing stroke with my putter that offered security at twenty yards. But now these approaches are guarded by traps. The greens are balanced on little mountains with sharp ditches all about. I hoist up from one to fall into another. "What a word, my son, has passed the barrier of your teeth!" said Athene once to Odysseus. Is the game so ancient? Were there sandpits, also, on the hills of stony Ithaca? Or in Ortygia, sea-girt? Was the dear wanderer off his game and fallen to profanity? The white-armed nymph Calypso must have stuffed her ears.

But now my troubles are behind me. I have cured my elbow of its fault. I keep my head down. My very clubs have taken on a different look since Saturday. I used to remark their nicks against the stones. A bit of green upon the heel of my driver showed how it was that I went sidewise to the woods. In those days I carried the bag spitefully to the shower. Could I leave it, I pondered, as a foundling in an empty locker? Or should I strangle it? But now all is changed. My clubs are servants to my will, kindly, obedient creatures that wait upon my nod. Even my brassie knows me for its master. And the country seems fairer. The valleys smile at me. The creek is friendly to my drive. The tall hills skip and clap their hands at my approach. My game needs only thought and care. My fives will become fours, my sixes slip down to fives. And here and there I shall have a three.

Except for a row of books my mantelpiece is bare. Who knows? Some day I may sweep off a musty row of history and set up a silver cup.

Later—Saturday again. I have just been around in 123. Horrible! I was in the woods and in the blackberry bushes, and in the creek seven times. My envious brassie! My well-belovèd mashie! Oh, vile conspiracy! Ambition's debt is paid. 123! Now—now it's my shoulder.

The Posture of Authors.

THERE is something rather pleasantly suggestive in the fashion employed by many of the older writers of inscribing their books from their chambers or lodging. It gives them at once locality and circumstance. It brings them to our common earth and understanding. Thomas Fuller, for example, having finished his Church History of Britain, addressed his reader in a preface from his chambers in Sion College. "May God alone have the glory," he writes, "and the ingenuous reader the benefit, of my endeavors! which is the hearty desire of Thy servant in Jesus Christ, Thomas Fuller."

One pictures a room in the Tudor style, with oak wainscot, tall mullioned windows and leaded glass, a deep fireplace and black beams above. Outside, perhaps, is the green quadrangle of the college, cloistered within ancient buildings, with gay wall—flowers against the sober stones. Bells answer from tower to belfry in agreeable dispute upon the hour. They were cast in a quieter time and refuse to bicker on a paltry minute. The sunlight is soft and yellow with old age. Such a dedication from such a place might turn the most careless reader into scholarship. In the seat of its leaded windows even the quirk of a Latin sentence might find a meaning. Here would be a room in which to meditate on the worthies of old England, or to read a chronicle of forgotten kings, queens, and protesting lovers who have faded into night.

Here we see Thomas Fuller dip his quill and make a start. "I have sometimes solitarily pleased myself," he begins, and he gazes into the dark shadows of the room, seeing, as it were, the pleasant spectres of the past. Bishops of Britain, long dead, in stole and mitre, forgetful of their solemn office, dance in the firelight on his walls. Popes move in dim review across his studies and shake a ghostly finger at his heresy. The past is not a prude. To her lover she reveals her beauty. And the scholar's lamp is her marriage torch.

Nor need it entirely cool our interest to learn that Sion College did not slope thus in country fashion to the peaceful waters of the Cam, with its fringe of trees and sunny meadow; did not possess even a gothic tower and cloister. It was built on the site of an ancient priory, Elsing Spital, with almshouses attached, a Jesuit library and a college for the clergy. It was right in London, down near the Roman wall, in the heart of the tangled traffic, and street cries kept breaking in—muffins, perhaps, and hot spiced gingerbread and broken glass. I hope, at least, that the good gentleman's rooms were up above, somewhat out of the clatter, where muffins had lost their shrillness. Gingerbread, when distance has reduced it to a pleasant tune, is not inclined to rouse a scholar from his meditation. And even broken glass is blunted on a journey to a garret. I hope that the old gentleman climbed three flights or more and that a range of chimney-pots was his outlook and speculation.