Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/241

At a crowded green like North Berwick, for instance, it is almost impossible to get a boy of thirteen and under to act as caddie; they are all at school. In England somehow there seems to be no difficulty at all. The golfer therefore is driven to get somebody, for to carry your own clubs is slavery, so grown-up men are pressed into the service, and as long as the season lasts the man does very well. But when the visitors go there is no longer the same demand, and under ordinary circumstances the man caddie would find himself in a bad way. Employers will not employ a man who wants to come and go just as his services as caddie permit him, so if there were no other means of earning a livelihood the caddie would go on the rates. At many seaside links, however, there are opportunities of fishing, and the dual trade of fisherman and caddie is very common in Scotland. I can see no objection to this system; the fisherman's life is a hard life, and a little variety does the man no harm, but only good. The objection is that winter fishing is the hardest sort of fishing, and it is the time that there is the least golf. Still there is in the case of the fisherman-caddie