So that was "a great day for golf," as Dr. Purves had truly said to me. It gave an added interest to all further competitions for this open championship; for what an amateur had once done, it seemed as if an amateur might do again, and thus the active interest was no longer confined to the professionals. The amateurs became at once something more than mere lookers on. There was only one man who did not seem to realize that Johnny Ball had done a big thing, and that was Johnny Ball. A week or so later he was playing a friendly match at Hoylake, and just as he was starting a stranger came up to him and said, "Can you please tell me, is the open champion playing here to-day?" and Johnny answered, "Yes, I believe he is." On which the stranger started out at score over the links in search of this "open champion," whom, presumably, he expected to recognize by some special halo set about his brow if he should come across him. Willie Park, fine all-round golfer and magnificent putter, was the previous holder of the championship, which he had won in 1889 at Musselburgh; and that was the last occasion on which this open championship ever was played on that excellent old nine-hole course. Just at this time the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers migrated down to Muirfield, and that green, instead of Musselburgh, became the third championship arena, the other two, at that date, being St. Andrews and Prestwick. CHAPTER XXIII GOLF ON THE CONTINENT AND IN THE CHANNEL ISLANDS In 1890 I took rooms in London, near a studio, and begun the serious study of anatomy and sculpture, with the idea of taking up sculpture as a profession. It was an idea which conflicted a good deal with the whole-souled devotion to golf. But following an attack of influenza, I went out to Biarritz in the winter and there found some of the most curious and amusing golf to be played that a man could meet with--up and down immense cliffs, in lies that were unspeakably bad, and yet, withal, the whole making, by some extraordinary means, not only an interesting species of golf, but also a species that has produced some fine players. Massy was then a boy there, going out in the sardine boats when he was not at golf, and thus gaining a perfect indifference to stormy weather which has been very valuable to him in his after life at golf. The storms on the Basque coast are not to be beaten: they are scratch, or even _plus_, as tempests.