It was the wooden age of golf clubs, as of battleships, and I hope the wood of our ships was better seasoned than that of our clubs. Shafts, as a rule, were of hickory then, as now, though we made strange experiments of ash, of lance-wood, of green-heart and divers species. For the hard balls of those days you had to have a certain softness in the heads of the wooden clubs which is not wanted with the resilient rubber-cored balls. Beech was the wood for the heads, though apple and other kinds were tried; but beech, and of a soft quality at that, drove the most kindly. And if a man were at all a hard hitter, and had a fit of heeling or toeing, the head of the club was sure very soon to show a crack across it, which would spread wider at each successive mishit. And even if you kept hitting the ball "dead centre" every time, a hole in the club-face would gradually be worn out by that repeated hitting, especially if the ground were wet and the grass long. Then we used to go to Johnnie Allan to have him put in a leather face, that is to say a patch of leather where the face was worn; and this would drive just as well, except it got sodden with wet, as the original wood. So, with so many of the clubs made of wood, and not always like the butter used by the Mad Hatter for watch greasing, the best wood, and the balls so hard and stony of impact, it is no wonder that golf was rather an expensive game for a boy whose shillings were not many. Though the ball only cost a shilling, while the modern ball costs half a crown, the club-smashing abilities of the shilling's worth made it a much dearer ball, to say nothing of the longer life of the half-crowner. And just about this date they introduced a novelty in the balls also--the "hammering," as we used to call it, that is to say the nicking or marking of the ball's surface, being done by indentations engraved in the metal moulds in which the balls were cast. This obviated all that labour of "hammering" the nicks in by hand, which was the ancient fashion. Yet it was some while before these "machine-hammered" balls, as we called them, found general favour with the golfing public, certain Conservatives asserting that the "hammering" was essential to the right tempering of the stuff of the ball, while others, like that great little man Jamie Anderson, then at the top of his game and fame, confessed, with a perfect knowledge that the reason was only subjective, that "he could na' strike" a machine-hammered ball. He soon learned to strike it, however, as the further course of golfing story sufficiently testified. CHAPTER VI HOW MEN OF WESTWARD HO! WENT ADVENTURING IN THE NORTH