Well may the writers of text-books of the game declare, when they come to the chapter on putting, that there is really nothing to say, and that they must leave the reader to find out the whole business by instinct and practice, as there are no rules to be laid down for his guidance. What would be the use of their pretending that they can really teach putting when, if they had to hole an eight-feet putt for a championship, the odds would be slightly against them? In June 1905, while I was smoking my pipe on the top of the bank on the far side of the home green at St. Andrews, I was being provided at intervals of no great length with much food for reflection and philosophy, better than which no man who ever talks or writes of golf could wish for. The Open Championship was being played for, and there duly came along Vardon, Braid, Taylor, and Herd, all more or less favourites for the event in progress, and it is a real fact that of these four men three of them missed putts at this home hole of less than a yard. I think the average length was about eighteen inches; one of them was not more than a foot, and the way in which the ball was worked round to the far side of the hole without going in was wonderful--quite wonderful. It will be noticed that I give four names and mention only three misses. This is because even the greatest players are sometimes very tender on this subject of missing short putts, and to spare them any annoyance I do not name the particular individuals who failed. It is enough that one of them, and one only, did not. The history of every man’s golf is covered with metaphorical gravestones as the result of all the short putts he has missed. Every season the whole course, and the result of almost every event of importance, would be changed if one or other of the parties did not miss some of these apparently unmissable putts. One need go no farther back than last year’s Amateur Championship meeting. I saw Mr. John Graham miss a two-feet putt in his match with Mr. Robb on the fourteenth green. This was the all-important match of the whole tournament, and in the light of what happened afterwards it was made to appear that the missing of this putt cost Mr. Graham the best chance he ever had in his hard and deserving golfing lifetime of winning the blue ribbon of the game. Mr. Robb himself fancied that Mr. Robert Andrew would be the ultimate winner of the championship that time at Hoylake, but on the eighteenth green in one of his rounds Mr. Andrew missed a putt of less than a foot for the match, and then had to go on to the nineteenth hole, where he was a well-beaten man. And in the final tie of all, if Mr. Lingen had never missed a short putt, who knows but what he would have been the champion of the year after all?