newspaper; and that competition itself is a witness to the growing recognition by the English world of the importance of golf and of its financial meaning. Golf was of use in the way of big advertisement. Also, the largest proprietors of the _News of the World_ were, and are, very good golfers and sportsmen, and doubtless appreciate all the good sport that this tournament provides. But, at the same time, we should, I think, wrong their commercial instincts if we did not realize that they see good advertisement in it besides. Men's motives are mixed. How well that team of Oxford and Cambridge graduates that went to America performed, we hardly realized at the time. We had a tendency to under-rate the American ability for golf, and the very fact that these pilgrims did so well inclined us all the more to make light of the American prowess. We are now, in course of the story, within sight of the year when Mr. Walter Travis, coming over here, was to give us a very different idea of the American capacity. We then began, perhaps, to go to the other extreme and to over-rate what they could do. They seemed to have "established a funk," to put it in homely phrase, which only Harold Hilton, going to America as our amateur champion and coming back with all the glory of the American amateur championship about him too, could altogether dissipate. But before that happened a lot of water had to run under the bridges. CHAPTER XXIX THE COMIC COMING OF THE HASKELL BALL In 1891 my brother-in-law, returning from a visit to America, came down to stay and to play golf with me at Ashdown Forest, and brought with him a dozen or two of a new kind of ball which, he said, had lately been invented in the United States and was the best ball in the world. The balls were called, as he told me, Haskells. We went out to play with them. He, as it happened, played very badly, and in a very short time he was perfectly ready to go into any court of law and take his oath that they were the worst balls in the world. I had formed my own opinion of them, much more in accord with the verdict with which he had first introduced them to me than with that condemnatory one which he passed on them after two days of being off his game; but I refrained from expressing my opinion too emphatically, with the result that when he went away he said that, as for the remnant of the balls, he was not going to be bothered "to take the beastly things away," so that I found myself the possessor of a couple of dozen or so of excellent Haskell balls--being, as he had said, in the first instance, the best balls in the world--at a time when no one else in Great Britain had such a ball at all! [Illustration: Old Leather Ball.] [Illustration: Hand-hammered Gutty.] [Illustration: Machine-marked Gutty.] [Illustration: Duncan. Taylor. Braid. Vardon. Gutty _v._ Rubber Core.]