“If you are a long-handicap foozler, make your start for the round either very early in the morning or very late, say nine o’clock or half-past eleven. Either of these times is just as good as half-past ten, and you will miss the crowd, have a clear course, and spare yourself the anxiety of being a constant annoyance to the scratch men behind you if you started at the busy time. You will play a much better game. “At the commencement don’t announce your handicap as either more or less than what it is at home, whatever your views upon the accuracy of the latter may be. If you say your handicap is more than it really is, you are grossly dishonest and a cheat, though some misguided players do so without any full sense of the grave responsibility of their action. On the other hand, many players with the best of motives say they are several strokes less than they really are, for the purpose of seeing what they can really do at a shorter handicap, and thus, as they put it, pull their game out. They also do it with the object of getting better matches, but their sins will find them out. They may very likely lose most of their matches, and their opponents, perhaps, will not care to play with them again, wanting something more to do. Besides, they may run up against some of their own club fellows, and then they may look rather foolish. “Don’t give your newly-made opponent-friend a long account of your many brilliant performances on your home course, particularly if the account is by way of being an excuse for your falling off on the present occasion. The probability is that he will take a large discount off your story, and in any case he doesn’t care an old gutta what you do at home. “Also, don’t make the shocking mistake of discussing with him the play and the manners of other visitors to the course with whom you have been having matches, or whom you have otherwise encountered on the green. It is very bad form, and, besides, after you have been denouncing some person or other, your companion may inform you that he is a friend of his. “Don’t ask permission of your opponent to take your wife or your sister or your mother round the links with you to watch the match, even with the proviso that she shall keep at a convenient distance from you both. Like the good fellow he is sure to be, he will say at once that he will be delighted, and will be most agreeable. But would you be delighted, and would you play your best game in such circumstances? Would not the presence of a lady stranger rather irritate you, however gallant you might desire to be? And what if all the players on the links did this kind of thing? The proper place for ladies who do not play golf is the seashore.