Can anything in a mechanical sort of way be done to overcome this awful difficulty? I fear not, though one or two new putters are invented every week, and some of them are acclaimed as being the philosopher’s stone for which we have been looking. The golf world began to buzz as if its mainspring had got loose when Mr. Travis won the championship at Sandwich with that Schenectady putter--the most epoch-making putter of all. But where is it now? Very few people use it. Putters have been made of every conceivable shape and of every possible material. Counting all variations, there are thousands of kinds of putters. They have been made with the heads bent back, forwards, and sideways. Some of them have had very thin blades, and others have had thick slabs instead of blades. They have been fashioned like knives, hammers, spades, croquet mallets, spoons, and riddles, and some even like putters; and they have been made of iron, gun-metal, steel, aluminium, nickel, silver, brass, wood, bone, and glass. I have here beside me a putter made in nickel, and consisting of a large roller, running on ball bearings! It is no good. The simplest are the best. We cannot obtain will-power by machinery or mechanical appliances. Mr. James Robb tells me that the putter he always uses is an ordinary cleek which he got when a boy. His sister won it in a penny raffle, and having no use for it herself she gave it to him, and he has putted with it ever since. Three times has he putted his way to the final of the championship, and once has he won it. Again, Mr. J. E. Laidlay conveys the information to me that when he was a boy at Loretto School he came by the first golf clubs he ever had in his life in his second or third term, these being a cleek and a brassey. That cleek-head has been his putter ever since, and it is getting so light with wear that his friends are beginning to tell him that it will soon do for him to shave with. Harry Vardon won his first championship with a putter which was not a putter at all, but a little cleek that he had picked up only the day before in Ben Sayers’ shop at North Berwick. He fancied it as a putter, and he has never putted better than on that day at Muirfield. He has never used it since, and now he has taken to the aluminium putter. And do you know that just before the famous championship at Sandwich, Mr. Travis was using a putting cleek that he, too, had got at North Berwick, and it was his intention to putt with it in the tournament? But he was not putting very well in practice at St. Andrews, and one of his compatriots then introduced to him for the first time in his life the Schenectady, which, after one successful trial, was forthwith commissioned for Sandwich. What a subject for a great historical painting to be hung up in the Temple of Golf that we shall have some day--“Emmett introducing the Schenectady to Travis, 1904.” I think it was Emmett; if it wasn’t, then it was Byers. Anyhow, golf history was