On a frosty day one is apt to damage clubs. The clubmaker does not mind his patrons playing on steely courses. The chances are that one man in a few will need something doing to his shafts or his wooden heads as the result of a day’s play. The list of casualties at sunset is considerable, and somewhat reminds one of the early days when a golf club was a much less lasting thing than it is at present. Old golfers are agreed that the breakage of a club by any kind of player is a thing of infinitely rare happening in comparison with what it used to be only a very few years ago. How is this? It cannot be that beginners are any better or more careful than they used to be, and one is very doubtful as to whether the clubs are made any better (although, perhaps, a trifle more elegant), or are endowed with any more strength than they were in the olden days when there were fewer of them to be made, and when so much time was spent upon their individual perfection. Some people think that the socketed shafts that have become firmly established are less reliable than others, and are more likely to give way under severe strain from misuse, and yet how seldom do we really see a wooden club give way at the socket? On the whole there can be no doubt that our modern clubs are thoroughly well made, but that the real cause why we so seldom see breakages is the lighter work that the clubs have to do with the rubber ball than they were set to in the old days of the gutta. In those old days the jar of impact was harder, severer, harsher, and it sent a shiver through the wrapping of the club that, often repeated, made for an eventual snap. Certainly the decrease in the breakages seems to date exactly from the beginning of the use of the rubber ball.