It was a noble and inspiring sight to see the Big Four, caps in hand, inviting the common people to play through. The entire club marched through them--too full of amazement to demand explanations. Even Purdue McCormick, trudging along with a putter in one hand and a mid-iron in the other, without a bag, without a caddie, without a vestige of right in the wide world, even Purdue was coerced into passing them. At dusk he was found wandering aimlessly about on the seventeenth fairway, babbling to himself. We fear that he will never be the same again. I have received word from Barney MacShane that the City Council will be pleased to grant a permit to lay a spur track on Third Avenue. The voice of the people, he says, has died away to a faint murmuring. Some day I think I will tell Barney the truth. He does not play golf, but he has a sense of humour. LITTLE POISON IVY I The leopard cannot change his spots--possibly he wouldn't if he could; and, this being the case, the next best thing is to overlook as many of his freckles as possible. Yesterday I sat on the porch at the Country Club and listened while the Dingbats said kind and complimentary things about young Ambrose Phipps, alias Little Poison Ivy, alias The Pest, alias Rough and Reddy. One short week ago the Dingbats would have voted him a nuisance and a menace to society in general. Yesterday they praised him to the skies. It just goes to show that good can be found in anybody--if that is what you are looking for. Understand me: there has been no change in Ambrose. He is still as fresh as a mountain breeze. Unquestionably he will continue to treat his elders with a shocking lack of respect and an entire absence of consideration. He was born with a deep depression where his bump of reverence should have been located, and neither realises nor regrets his deficiency. He will never change. It is the Dingbats who have changed. The whole club has changed, so far as Ambrose is concerned. We are all trying to overlook the dark spots in his character and see good in him, whether it is there or not. Now as to the Dingbats: if you do not know them you have missed something rich and rare in the golfing line. There are four of them, all retired capitalists on the shady side of sixty. They freely admit that they are the worst golfers in the world, and in a pinch they could prove it. They play together six days a week--a riotous, garrulous, hilarious foursome, ripping the course wide open from the first tee to the home green; and they get more real fun out of golf than any men I know. They never worry about being off their game, because they have never been on it; they know they can be no worse than they are and they have no hope of ever being better; they expect to play badly, and it is seldom that they are disappointed. Whenever a Dingbat forgets to count his shots in the bunkers, and comes home in the nineties, a public celebration takes place on the clubhouse porch.