The Badminton Library of Sport was then coming out, volume by volume, and delighting all to whom Sports and Pastimes made appeal. I do not wish to bring too great discredit on a very eminent firm of publishers, but it is a fact, sad as it is true, that when I first waited on them, obedient to their summons, in Paternoster Row, and they broached to me the subject of a golf book in their series, they made the very shocking suggestion that it should be included in the same volume with other Scottish sports, such as skating, curling and perhaps tossing the caber. They did not know, they said, when I met them with some mild expostulation, whether the game was "of sufficient importance to carry a volume to itself." I must do them the justice to say that they quickly saw and repented of their error, and I believe that ultimately the golf volume did better than any other in all that popular series. While I was doing some of the writing for this book, Sir Ralph Payne Galway was writing the Shooting volumes, and we were both staying with poor John Penn at his house in Carlton House Terrace. One night John Penn asked Mr. Purdey, the gun-maker, to dinner, to talk guns with Sir Ralph; and these two sat long over the dessert, after the rest of us had left the table, talking of loads and bores and so on. The next morning, while we were at breakfast, a four-wheeler drove up to the door, and Sir Ralph, looking out, said in dismay, "By Jove, John, I believe that under the influence of your champagne I must have ordered a whole 'bus load of guns from Purdey." We looked out, and the four-wheeler was filled, from roof to floor, with guns. It appeared, however, that they were not all on order, but had merely been sent round by Mr. Purdey for inspection. This, however, is not golf; nor was Sir Ralph then, I think, a golfer, in spite of the good service he has since rendered to the dynamics of the golf stroke and in spite of the excellence of the "P.G." ball. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 4: Re-reading this, in 1919, even Hall Blyth's name has to be added to those that have gone.] CHAPTER XXI A MORE LIBERAL POLICY AT ST. ANDREWS