most men can put more cut on the ball with a lightly than with a tightly held club, but further than that, there is not any very general recognition, so far as I know, of a virtue in the light grip. After I lost the amateur championship at Prestwick in 1888, these two Johnnies, the English and the Scottish, held it between them, winning two apiece for four years, so that it was not until Mr. Peter Anderson won, in the seventh year of its institution, that we let it go out of the hands of one of the three. Neither Johnny Laidlay nor I were fated to win again, but as for the other Johnny, there seems to be no saying when he will be done with it. To be sure he has a few years' advantage. CHAPTER XX A CHAPTER OF ODDS AND ENDS In 1886 my father took a house at Eastbourne, and I was no longer at Westward Ho! as constantly as before, although a frequent visitor there at the house of Claud Carnegie. He and I used to have many matches on terms that are rather to be commended as a means for bringing together two players of different handicaps. We used to play level, but I had to give him five shillings before starting and at the end he paid me back a shilling for every hole that I was up. It came, of course, to the same thing as giving five holes up, but it is rather a more amusing way of stating these odds. The five shillings puts me in mind of a very much more gambling match that was played about that time, when I was at Hoylake. There was at that date a very festive company of Edinburgh golfers going about the various links under the leadership of old Mr. Robert Clark, who edited the great book on golf. There was Sir Walter Simpson, who also wrote a great golf book and was the son of the doctor who discovered the blessed uses of chloroform, Hall Blyth, Valentine Haggard, Cathcart, Jack Innes, and a few more--all, I fear, except Hall Blyth, gone over to the majority.[4] Five of these warriors started out one day at Hoylake to play a five-ball match, for a fiver a hole, and--this was the prudent stipulation of Mr. Robert Clark, in his ancient wisdom--they were to settle up at the end of each hole. The man who happened to fall into bad trouble would thus have to part with four fivers on the putting green, so it must have needed a well-filled notebook to make a man sure of living through to the finish without bankruptcy. I had suggested that a six-ball match would be really more fun than a five-ball, and that I was willing to make the sixth; but the well-meant suggestion was not taken in good part. I forget the ultimate result of the encounter.