Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/231

spot they require, or leave it alone if it does not, it is impossible to say. A funeral is not an exciting or particularly pleasant occupation, but there are many funerals where a dead silence is not more cultivated than at some golf matches; and it is stupid and useless to fly into a passion because somebody thirty or forty yards off who is not playing golf at all, or at any rate has nothing to do with you, talks or laughs so that you must hear him. Unless the green is a private one the talker has as much right to be there and to laugh or talk as you have to play golf, and every player should try and keep this fact in mind. It is advisable that nobody should stand behind a man's club when he hits the ball, but even this, I feel convinced, a man can get accustomed to, if he will only apply his mind to it. If you don't want to talk yourself you can be as dumb as a drum with a hole in it, as Sam Weller says, and you may go farther, and forbid anybody to speak to you; but to stamp and swear because somebody within hearing distance of you chooses to talk to a friend is ridiculous and silly, partly because it is contemptible, and partly because, as you are not in a position to stop all con-