ILLUSTRATIONS

[The writer, the first English Captain of the Royal and Ancient, buying back, according to custom, the ball struck off to win the Captaincy]
[Borough House, Northam]
[Mr. Peter Steel driving the gravel pit at Blackheath]
[At Pau: the oldest of non-Scottish Golf Clubs]
[Captain's Medal of the Royal North Devon Golf Club]
[The Ladies' Course at Pau, in the Days of the Crinoline]
[Miss Cecil Leitch]
[Westward Ho!]
[An Old Hoylake Group]
[An Old Westward Ho! Group]
[Thomas Owen Potter]
["Old Tom"]
[Douglas Rolland and Archie Simpson]
[John Ball]
[A.F. Macfie]
[A.J. Balfour]
[Crawford]
[John Ball, as a Yeoman]
[J.E. Laidlay]
[The Chasm on the Old Biarritz Course]
[Arnaud Massy]
[J.E. Laidlay, John Ball, junr., Horace G. Hutchinson, and P.C. Anderson]
[H.H. Hilton]
[Freddy Tait]
[J.H. Taylor]
[Harry Vardon]
[James Braid]
[Horace Hutchinson and Leslie Balfour Melville]
[Amateur Championship, St. Andrews, 1901]
[Amateur Championship, St. Andrews, 1895]
[Old Leather Ball, etc.]
[Gutty v. Rubber Core]
[The Amateur and Professional Sides at Sandwich in 1894]
["Fiery"]
[Walter Travis]
[Charles B. Macdonald]

FIFTY YEARS OF GOLF

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS

I believe it is a little more than fifty years really. I do not mean to imply that I have been for that length of time actively engaged in the serious pursuit of the golf ball, but I expect that I began to take interest in what I understood as golf about the age of four. At that time my father was at Government House in Devonport, as General in Command of the Western District, and my Uncle Fred, Colonel Hutchinson, used to come there and tell us of some game, the most wonderful in the world, that he had lately learned to play when he was in Scotland, as Adjutant of the Fife Militia. He lived at Wemyss Hall, in Fife, and used to ride over to St. Andrews, breakfasting en route with Mr. Bethune of Blebo, and taking him on along with him, for a round or two rounds.