Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/220

fore to be more of a test of nerve than golf. I contend, however, that it is not, because of the varying conditions of the greens and turf. In billiards you play for a whole evening or for a whole match on the same table; that is a very small object as compared with a putting-green, and if you have any pretensions to play at all, you ought to gauge the pace of a billiard-table after an hour's play. At golf, however, it may be truly said that no one putting-green is exactly like any other—one is fast, another slow, one smooth, another uneven, one with one sort of turf, another with another. Some holes are in a sort of pot, which, though small just where the hole is, nevertheless has widely expanding sides, and you probably will find your ball dead if you get it into it at all from any distance; but another is on a table-land, where the chief difficulty is not to get the ball on the table-land but to keep it there. You may find one green covered with blown sand, while another has not even much grass on it; while one green may be up-hill on the approach side, and another down-hill. Of course it is easy to see if a green is on a level and if on a slope, but it is by no means