J.E. Laidlay, John Ball, junr., Horace G. Hutchinson, and P.C. Anderson 150 H.H. Hilton 151 Freddy Tait 154 J.H. Taylor 156 Harry Vardon 157 James Braid 160 Horace Hutchinson and Leslie Balfour Melville 161 Amateur Championship, St. Andrews, 1901 174 Amateur Championship, St. Andrews, 1895 175 Old Leather Ball, etc. 180 Gutty _v._ Rubber Core 181 The Amateur and Professional Sides at Sandwich in 1894 186 "Fiery" 187 Walter Travis 210 Charles B. Macdonald 211 FIFTY YEARS OF GOLF CHAPTER I THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS I believe it is a little more than fifty years really. I do not mean to imply that I have been for that length of time actively engaged in the serious pursuit of the golf ball, but I expect that I began to take interest in what I understood as golf about the age of four. At that time my father was at Government House in Devonport, as General in Command of the Western District, and my Uncle Fred, Colonel Hutchinson, used to come there and tell us of some game, the most wonderful in the world, that he had lately learned to play when he was in Scotland, as Adjutant of the Fife Militia. He lived at Wemyss Hall, in Fife, and used to ride over to St. Andrews, breakfasting _en route_ with Mr. Bethune of Blebo, and taking him on along with him, for a round or two rounds. I used to hear a great deal of talk about this wonderful game, between my father and my uncle, the former having scarcely a more clear-cut idea of what it was like than I myself; but I can well remember his attempting to give some description of it, in my uncle's absence, to a friend, and hearing this remark: "A man knows his own weapon, that he uses in the game, and it is as important to him to have the weapon that he knows as it is to a billiard player to have his own cue. And they use several different kinds of weapon at the game, for strokes of different strength."