So, even in the far West we were not without our great examples, and Johnnie Allan himself was a golfer well worth following. As the course then started, out by the Pebble Ridge and at the present third tee, we, coming from Northam, had to walk out over the flatter part of the Burrows which the first and second, and, again, the seventeenth and eighteenth holes occupy now. That meant, of course, that we would take a club with us and practise shots as we went along; and since I so often had Johnnie Allan as my companion on those walks, it would be very hard for me to say how much of golfing skill and wisdom I did not unconsciously pick up as we went along and he watched me play the shots and criticised them. I have never in my life been through the solemn process of a set lesson with a professional, but have no doubt that I assimilated wisdom in the best, because the unconscious and the imitative, way, in those walks and talks, varied by occasional precept and example, with Johnnie Allan. And by the same route came Captain Molesworth and his three sons, but they, having further to go, used to drive, the Captain generally manipulating the reins in strictly professional style--as a sailor clutches the rudder lines--and their carriage, going at full speed of the horse, making very heavy weather of it over the ruts and bumps, and only the sailor's special providence ever bringing them safe to port before the Iron Hut. There the Captain would tie his horse, by a halter, to the wheel of the cart and leave all to get itself into a tangle that only a nautical hand could unravel, while all the world played golf. Sometimes we too would ride or drive, and I have in mind a great occasion on which my brother, home from India, and I were driving down in my sister's donkey-cart. The cart broke down in Northam village, so we left it there, in charge of the blacksmith, to repair, while we proceeded on, both mounted on the donkey. Now my brother was very much of what at that time was called a "dandy"--since "masher," and at the present moment "nut." He was arrayed in Solomon-like glory of white flannel trousers and red coat--for men did play golf in red coats in those days. Now the donkey was a good donkey and strong, but he knew how to kick, and he thought no occasion could be better than when he had two on his back and the central and fashionable high street of Northam village for the arena. Therefore he set to and quickly kicked us both off, I being involved in my brother's débacle, and he, though a very good man on a horse, not being accustomed to a saddleless donkey. The glory of Solomon disposed on the village streets was a splendid spectacle. But we rose, nothing daunted, though with the glory a little sullied, and, my brother then excogitating the great thought that if we put his, the greater, weight behind, with mine in front--it had been the other way at our first essay--the donkey would then find it the harder