Thinking thus, we perceive the value of influenza and the minor illnesses, and come to realise the truth of the remark by one earnest golfer, that the thing that of all others had most improved his game of golf was a severe attack of typhoid fever, which all but summarily terminated his career. When this man told us that he emerged from that disquieting experience a new and better golfer, and one more thorough, the observation seemed cryptic to the point of absurdity, and it was not taken very seriously. But it is certainly true that a very earnest golfer will think long and hard upon all points of his game during a dull period of enforced rest and idleness such as comes at sickness, and then all the sins of omission and commission loom up in his troubled mind, and he corrects the faults that he knows now, as probably he would not admit before, went to the undoing of his game. The entire position is revised; in the early days of convalescence we send downstairs to the study for some favourite volumes, and we look up Vardon, Braid, or Taylor on a subtle point of which we have been making mental examination. The thoughtful studies of Mr. John Low are a stimulant at such times. Such introspection is a fine thing and most fruitful, and little wonder after all that the player does indeed return to health a wiser and a more complete golfer, who will now go farther in skill upon the links than ever he would have done in the old, narrow, careless days. What follows is a story that bears somewhat upon the moral that we have been thinking over. There was a man who was in want of a shot that would come between the driving iron and the wood, and he could not find one. Of the cleek he had no good word to say; he could not play it. Of driving mashies he had several, and some of them were well enough at times, and at others they were like the cleek, so that what with his driving mashies and his cleeks, this man was in constant jeopardy when there was a shot of a hundred and sixty or seventy yards to play, and so he was unhappy in his game. It happened that one of his driving mashies was one that had been gifted to him upon a day by a great player, who said, “I pick this from all that I have seen; may I never play more if it is not a perfect club!” The man tried it, and it seemed to him that the head wanted more ballast, and after a little while he allowed the club to be gathered to his fine collection of idle relics, saying to himself consolingly, “What suits one man does not suit another.” Thus it came to pass that the perfect club that a champion player declared he would love to play a long-short hole with to save the life of himself or his dearest friend, lay for months and years in a dark cupboard.