The seventeenth hole has been more praised and more abused probably than any other hole in the world. It has been called unfair, and by many harder names as well; it has caused champions with a predilection for pitching rather than running to tear their hair; it has certainly ruined an infinite number of scores. Many like it, most respect it, and all fear it. First there is the tee-shot, with the possibility of slicing out of bounds into the station-master's garden or pulling into various bunkers on the left. Then comes the second, a shot which should not entail immediate disaster, but which is nevertheless of enormous importance as leading up to the third. Finally, there is the approach to that little plateau--in contrast to most of the St. Andrews greens, a horribly small and narrow one--that lies between a greedy little bunker on the one side and a brutally hard road on the other. It is so difficult as to make the boldest inclined to approach on the instalment system, and yet no amount of caution can do away with the chance of disaster. There was a harrowing moment in the Championship of 1910 when Braid's ball lay in the little bunker under the green. Even if he got it safely out, it was practically certain he would be two strokes behind Duncan, with one round to go; if he did not get it out, or got it out too far and so on to the road, his chances would be terribly jeopardized. It was, as I say, an agonizing moment, but no one plays the heavy 'dunch' shot out of sand quite so surely as Braid. Down came the niblick, up spouted the sand, and out came the ball, to fall spent and lifeless close to the hole and out of reach of that cruel road. After this hole of many disastrous memories, the eighteenth need have no great terrors. We drive over the burn, cross by the picturesque old stone bridge, and avoiding the grosser forms of sin, such as slicing into the windows of Rusack's hotel, hole out in four, or at most five, under the critical gaze of those that lean on the railings. No account of St. Andrews would be complete without some mention of the new course, which runs more or less parallel with the old; the two, to say nothing of the Jubilee course that runs along the spurs of the sandhills, being all squeezed into a wonderfully narrow compass.