Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/182

Rh and to field out all day in hot weather at that age is weariness and a burden. Here is one of the reasons why golf has been taken to in England with a vigour and force that certainly is the most astonishing feature in the history of games that I have any experience of at all.

I have said that nobody can become a really first-rate golfer who has not begun the game early in life. I believe this to be absolutely true; but it is equally true that a very respectable skill can be acquired by men whose eye and muscles are attuned to games, if they have never handled a club till thirty years old. Mr. Charles Hutchings of Hoylake, I believe, began when he was well over thirty years of age, and he became good enough to win a St. Andrews medal, but this is a very exceptional case, and I dare believe that Mr. Hutchings himself would admit that he could not be put quite in the same class with Messrs. Ball, Laidlay, Tait, and Hutchinson. Football cannot be played at all after thirty: I know of no one instance where anybody ever took to cricket at that time of life, and I am absolutely certain that