I started out in the afternoon without the smallest idea in life that I was to be beaten by "that American"; but I had not played two shots before I knew that all the best of the fight had been taken out of me by that stiff morning match. As Andrew Kirkaldy said to me afterwards: "That," pointing to Bobby, "that was your murderer." He had, in truth, done most of the killing, and Travis had but to finish it. He did not really play very well. Still, he was one up on me going to the thirteenth hole, and there gave me every chance of winning it and squaring the match, but I played a very bad shot, and followed it with another indifferent one, and so let him win that hole which I ought to have won. He gave me no further chances, and beat me by, I think, three and two. But I reckoned things up afterwards and found, by the score of the holes, that if I had played as well as I did in any of the previous matches, I should have been up on him, instead of down, at the point where he beat me. That, however, is what makes an amateur champion--that, amongst other things--the ability to "stay" through a long fight and not to suffer reaction after a hard match. In the final, Travis had to meet Ted Blackwell, and I never had great hopes for England as to the result of that encounter. I say this, with all respect for Ted Blackwell's great game as he developed it almost immediately afterwards; but he was not his great self then. At that time he was still putting with a thin-bladed little cleek which must have been forged about the date that Tubal Cain was in active work as a smith. Very shortly afterwards someone, who deserves to suffer lingering death at the hands of all Ted Blackwell's later opponents, induced him to take to an aluminium putter. The difference it made in his game was nearer a third than four strokes, as I reckon it. From a really bad putter he became all at once a very good putter indeed. I knew all about it, for I had been playing him and beating him comfortably in several matches at St. Andrews, in course of a little party which Lord Dudley took up there. I met him again in an international match at Hoylake only a little later, when he had exchanged the tinkling cleek for the aluminium putter, and he beat me--not by length of driving, but by length of putting.