One of the episodes of the match was that the poor "Old Mole" came out to watch it, bringing with him a small pack of whippet dogs which danced about us as we played, to the exasperation of tried nerves. I have already paid due honour to the great work that he did in early days for English golf, and it is only while these pages were in course of writing that his death happened, where so much of his life had been passed, at Westward Ho! Johnny Ball won his eighth championship at this Westward Ho! meeting, and his final opponent was Abe Mitchell. I was referee and saw the whole of that match. Johnny had only escaped by the skin of his teeth, and by his imperturbable match-playing ability, from the hands of Mr. Bond, in an earlier heat. Mr. Bond had been five up, no less, and eight to play. And then he drank a bottle of ginger-beer, and never did a hole in the right number afterwards. But it is all to Johnny Ball's credit, and just like him, that even when his fortunes were thus apparently desperate he never did despair. He, for his part, went on doing the holes in the right number (which was more than he had done on the way out, when he lost five holes), and won at the nineteenth after a halved round. Abe Mitchell was not hitting the ball at his hardest in the match with Johnny, but both played well. In the afternoon it came on to pelt with rain, which suited Johnny, but Abe did not mind it either. The match stood all square with three to play and Abe laid Johnny what looked like a very dead stymie at the sixteenth, but Johnny somehow got round it. Abe won the seventeenth, thus making himself dormy, and both were on the last green with two shots each. Johnny holed out in two putts, Abe just failed to do so. Then they halved the thirty-seventh hole--not with quite blameless golf on either side--and at the thirty-eighth Abe topped his tee shot heavily, and that was the end of it. I regret to say that I did not go to Muirfield in 1909; for they had one of the finest finishes there of any championship. Cecil Hutchison was a hole up and two to play in the final against Bobby Maxwell: he did the last two holes in four and five, and the last on that day was very hard to reach in two. We may almost say that he did both in the right number. Yet he lost both, and therewith the championship, to Bobby, who did them in three and four. The three was scarcely human.