It is very difficult to draw a correct comparison between these courses of St. Andrews and Hoylake, then and now, in respect of the difficulties that each presented to the golfer. The whins at St. Andrews encroached, on what is now either the clear ground of the course, or is dotted only with occasional trappy bunkers amongst which the ball often finds quite a good lie, in such a dense mass that a wandering ball was hardly worth the trouble of looking for among them. At Hoylake the little rushes, which are now scarcely to be regarded as a hazard at all, used to be very dense too, and in the summer and autumn a tough long grass grew among them, so that your ball lay as if in a plover's nest, and sometimes it took you several strokes to get out. It was a horrid hazard. Then at some of the earlier and later holes of the course the remaining posts and rails of the disused racecourse were very vexing. To find yourself tight up against a post was only a little less annoying than to hit it with a full shot and to find your ball come dancing back to you or flying past your head as if it meant to brain you. All these things happened. Then the rabbit holes were more numerous and came farther out on the course. It was about this time that I was moved to much fury in course of a match by seeing my ball lying at the bottom of a burrow, where I could not reach it, and, when I was on the point of dropping another ball with loss of stroke (as was specifically permitted by the local rule regarding rabbit holes), being told, "You mayn't do that--it's a lost ball." "Lost, be d----d," I said. "What d'you mean by lost? Why there it is: you can see it for yourself." "Yes," said the other, "but a ball is lost unless you can garther it"--he was a Scot, with a patriotic accent, and he spoke of the ball as if it were a daisy or other flower. I concluded the round under protest and a cloud of wrath; and, what made the cloud blacker--the Committee upheld the view of the "gartherer." Possibly they may have been right, but certainly I did not think so at the time. CHAPTER XVII THE FIRST GOLF IN AMERICA