It is an ancient game; but let no man think yet that we have realised a fair part of the curious situations that may arise on the links when the golfer hits a ball, or that we have a full appreciation of the possibilities of their complexity. Very quaint are some of the difficulties that twice a year are presented to the Rules of Golf Committee sitting at St. Andrews for the special purpose of discovering solutions thereto. From far Manawatu once there came a plaintive cry for help. These New Zealand golfers confessed that in all the holes on their greens there is an iron box with a small flag on the top to mark the holes. In an inter-club match the caddie of one of the players before leaving the green, when replacing the box, put it into the hole, flag downwards, exposing a sharp point on the top. One of the next two players, when approaching to that hole, landed his ball on the top of the box in the hole, and it remained there. Then the arguments began, and not until a letter had sailed the seas from the Antipodes, and the Royal and Ancient Club had sent her answer back to this outpost of her empire of golf, did they subside. The man who had executed this wonderful shot had held that he could reverse the box and put it into its proper position and claim the hole. It hurt St. Andrews to think that away there in New Zealand, left to their own resources, they should give themselves up to such queer-fangled contrivances as hole flags with boxes on them. If a bit of cloth and a stick of sorts is good enough for the old course, why should Manawatu want what these Royal and Ancients sarcastically referred to as “mechanical contrivances”? The high authority begged leave to observe that the Rules of Golf did not provide for such “mechanical contrivances,” and the New Zealanders were recommended to make local rules to suit them.