In the year 1875, I having then arrived at the advanced age of sixteen, and being admitted as a member of the Royal North Devon Golf Club, in the autumn committed the blazing indiscretion of winning the scratch medal which carried with it the Captaincy of the club. How glaring the indiscretion was may be gathered from the fact that this Captaincy, thus conferred, entailed the obligation of taking the chair at the general meetings. I do not know that I made a much bigger hash of it than any other boy forced into the same unnatural position would have done. It had not been contemplated, apparently, that a schoolboy was likely to beat all the reverend seniors, and one good effect was that the regulation was altered, and winning this medal did not much longer confer on a person who might be the least fitted for it the function of presiding at the meetings. But it had given to me a dignity which could not be changed by legislation. At the spring meeting of that very same year I had received no less a handicap than twelve strokes, so I must have been very much of that nuisance to the handicapper, the "improving player." I became a "scratch player," however, from the autumn of that year. In those days, before handicaps were fixed, golfing society was divided into two classes--those who were scratch, and those who were not--and there was no idea of such a thing as a penalty or _plus_ handicap. Some of the so-called "scratch" players of the day were exceedingly scratchy ones, and only supported their dignity at a considerable expense: there was one in particular of whom it was said that it cost him three hundred a year to be a scratch player or, that is to say, to play all and sundry amateurs on level terms.