It is a glorious thing to play a game that one need never give up, however long one may live. And what is more, the game can be played well by the veteran, and he enjoys it almost as much as ever, and does not merely take part in it for the sake of the fresh air and the exercise. Possibly if he had not been a golfer in his middle age, and perhaps in his youth as well, he would not be able to play any game, even a fireside game, by the time he was due to become an octogenarian. For some years previously his pleasures would have been with the angels. One cannot discover who is the oldest golfer, but there are many still active on the links who are nearing ninety, including a celebrated peer-patron of the game. Considering the matter from the other point of view, we have the remarkable fact that nearly every professional golfer of note in these days (and a large though decreasing proportion of amateurs) began to play golf of some sort as soon as his baby intelligence had developed sufficiently to make him understand that if he hit a ball with a stick it would move. They began to play as soon as they could walk, and almost to a man they declare that the very first memories they have of anything in life are associated with playing some kind of childish golf, and aping their elders in every possible way. It is to the fact of their having done so that they attribute most of their success in their after life at the game. As children they developed a free, easy, natural swing that has stood them in good stead ever since, and it has become so rooted into their system that they are far less liable than other golfers who began much later, to be constantly going off their game and dropping out of their proper swing. Harry Vardon, James Braid, J. H. Taylor, Alexander Herd, Willie Park, Jack White, and all the rest of them played golf as the very smallest children. The two last-named both declare that they developed their extraordinary putting faculties when they were mere babies. Park, a king of putters, it is certain, gained his extraordinary delicacy of touch, and fine discrimination in selecting the line to the hole, through practising as a very small boy with marbles on the stone or brick floor of his father’s workshop at Musselburgh, a slight hollow in the floor being regarded as the hole. He got a passion for such putting practice, and at nights would surreptitiously borrow the key to the shop and hie there with some other boys for putting practice. He says that he has never had such hard putting to do since, and that when in due course he went out on the links to play the real game, putting seemed very easy to him. The first clubs that Alexander Herd ever used were glued together for him by his mother, and his first golf was obtained in the streets of St. Andrews. It was much the same with several of the best amateurs, though from the evidence that one can obtain they do not appear to have