It is not very easy to find a man who, all through his golfing time, has delighted more in the storms and the rain than Johnny Ball, but I believe there is one--that same who came as a little flaxen-haired boy to our house at Northam--J.H. Taylor. He is open champion, for the fifth time, as I write, and he won that championship at Hoylake in weather as villainous, especially on the second day, as any that has generally been served out to us for the finals of the amateur championship. One cannot say worse of it. He had a stroke or so in hand, of the whole of his field, at the start of that second day, but the curious thing is that when the rest of the professors saw what kind of day it was, they never doubted that Taylor would win. He has a mastery over the ball in these circumstances, both in the drive and in his low and heavily cut approaches, that none other can rival--not even Vardon nor Braid themselves. In respect of these more recent years I find that my reminiscences begin to deal more and more with things I have seen and less with things I have done--which is as much as to say that they must begin to lose the vivid personal touch. In 1908 the Royal and Ancient Club did me the high honour to elect me, first of Englishmen, as their Captain. As one of my wife's relations was good enough to say--"I'm glad they've made Horace that--it will look so well in his obituary notice." So it will; but I hope not yet. I had great ambitions to win the medal on the day that I struck off the ball whereby I played myself in as Captain, but though I contrived to hit that ball, and actually to hit it into the air, I was not well enough to take part in the medal play. In the winter of 1909 a little party of us--Tony Fairlie, Charles Hutchings and myself had been at Westward Ho! I had not seen the course for seven years, and it struck us all, with one accord, as the finest thing in golf (did we make reservation in St. Andrews' favour? I hardly think so) that we had ever seen. And during that visit I had played better than I had played for years and years before. I was in great delight and really had visions of a renewed youth and of having "got it back." And then returning home, I caught the worst go of influenza that I ever have had, which is a great deal to say, and never played golf properly again.