I think it was in 1888, soon after I came back from America, that I had my first match of any public note with Johnny Laidlay. I think it was the Town Council or some other people anxious to attract golfers to North Berwick--is it conceivable now that there should be a desire to attract more?--that gave some prizes for a scratch tournament open to all amateurs. Johnny Laidlay persuaded me to enter (he was my host for the occasion), and he gave me a good hammering in the final bout. For we both survived till the final, and I remember that, starting out, we both played badly enough for a hole or two. Then I lighted a pipe and smoked it, and it is a sign of how times have changed that one of the Scottish papers, commenting on the match, said, "At this point Mr. Hutchinson lit a pipe and smoked it and actually did not remove it from his mouth while playing the strokes--a thing never seen before in a big match." That seems queer comment at this time of day, when the incense of tobacco curls perpetually upward from the pipe of champion Ray and when the cigarette of Harold Hilton is like the fire that is never quenched. But the soothing of the nerves and accuracy of game that I had hoped to follow from the lighting of that particular pipe did not ensue. Mr. Laidlay found his game, while I was still looking vainly for mine, and he hammered me, if I remember right, pretty easily. The reporters were fairly out after me that day. They criticised the pipe unfavourably, and then one of them recorded a painful incident of the game in the following terse and pregnant sentence: "Here Mr. Hutchinson broke his niblick, his favourite club." I do not know whether this literary gentleman had seen me in bunkers and niblicking out of them so frequently that he inferred the niblick to be the club that I most loved to have in hand; at all events, that was his comment, and it went home. I think they must have had a golfing reporter at this time with a vein of ironic humour about him, for it was then, or nearly then, that one of them wrote about Captain Willy Burn: "Here the Captain hit one of his characteristic shots--far into the whins!" Whether it all was irony or innocence we did not know, for this commentator did his good work by stealth and we never found him out.