Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/189

154 the ball has been moved by the wind after the player has put himself in a certain attitude, though he has no more touched it than he has the moon. Golf, indeed, has come to be so much hedged round by rules that these defeat their own object, and by respectable people are ignored. It always appears to me that rules of any game should be such that it is to the advantage of the game that they should be enforced always and by everybody. Whist, for instance, has a code of rules that seem to be so reasonable that they are all of them enforced, and nobody who insists on the letter of the law at whist is thought the worse of, or guilty of sharp practice; and this is the case also at football. But at golf such is not the case, and the man who exacts extreme penalties is a gentleman who is generally to be found searching in vain for an opponent.

At cricket you may play against any eleven, and you may enjoy your game. But golf is a painful game when played against an opponent of a certain type. The sulky player who is moody and never smiles, the fierce-tempered man who makes you miserable while he curses his caddie who has not the right of reply, the man