Willie Fernie was the only one of the professionals who ever condescended much to them, and I have been playing with him when he used a putty going out at St. Andrews, in the teeth of the wind, and then took a gutty coming home down wind. But he did not make much of it. The two balls required such a very different touch for the short game that it was very difficult to go from one to the other--it is in that that the point lies of the above quotation from my "idiotic little book." But Willie Fernie was a man of infinite ingenuity. The ball, evidently from what I have said of it, was a fine ball against the wind--it kept so low and so straight. On hard ground it would make up in its run for its loss in carry, and therefore it was a better ball on the flatter than on the more mountainous links. But in this account of its qualities, I have also indicated its defects. Running as it did when it pitched, it was an impossible ball to stop on the green off a lofted shot; and just as it would not take much cut, so as to go far to right or left when heeled or toed, so it would not take a cut when one purposely tried to put a cut on to stop it. On the whole I liked the ball. It was very economical, because it would last for ever and because its soft substance did not inflict such damage on the clubs as the hard "gutty." I won both the first two amateur championships with a putty ball. I do not mean that I used the same ball in each. But Andy Stuart had a putty ball with which--the same identical ball--he won three St. Andrews' medals. The great argument against them was the difficulty aforesaid of stopping them off the pitch. That, and their lack of carry, were their weak points: their straight travel, especially off the putter, was their strong point. And then, all at once, the manufacturers began to make them less good. Just what happened I never knew. I think that they changed the mixture in order to get them harder, and, so, more like the "gutties"; but whatever the reason, the effect was that they lost much of their merits and never overcame their defects. Result--exit the putty ball towards the end of the eighties, and the gutty holding the market until the Americans sent us what at first were called Haskells; which is another and more modern story.