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disconcerted.
    "I hadn't looked at it like that," he confessed.
    "Posterity will," said Harold Pickering.
    "Yes, I see what you mean. Postpone it, then, you think, eh?"
    "Indefinitely."
    "Oh, not indefinitely. We'll get together after the match. After all," said Sidney McMurdo, looking on the bright side, "it isn't long to wait."
    It was at this point that I joined them. As generally happened in those days, I had been given the honour of refereeing the final. I asked if they were ready to start.
    "Not only ready," said Sidney McMurdo. "Impatient."
    Harold Pickering said nothing. He merely moistened the lips with the tip of the tongue.
     
    My friends (proceeded the Oldest Member) have sometimes been kind enough to say that if there is one thing at which I excel, it is at describing in meticulous detail a desperately closely fought golf match - taking my audience stroke by stroke from tee one to hole eighteen and showing fortune fluctuating now to one side, now to the other, before finally placing the laurel wreath on the perspiring brow of the ultimate winner. And it is this treat that I should like to be able to give you now.
    Unfortunately, the contest for that particular club championship final does not lend itself to such a description. From the very outset it was hopelessly one-sided. Even as we walked to the first tee, it seemed to me that Harold Pickering was not looking his best and brightest. But I put this down to a nervous man's natural anxiety before an important match, and even when he lost the first two holes by the weakest type of play, I assumed that he would soon pull himself together and give of his best.
    At that time, of course, I was not aware of the emotions surging in his bosom. It was only some years later that I ran into him and he told me his story and its sequel. That afternoon, what struck me most was the charming spirit of courtesy in which he played the match. He was losing every hole with monotonous regularity, and in such circumstances even the most amiable are apt to be gloomy and sullen, but he never lost his affability. He seemed to be straining every nerve to ingratiate himself with Sidney McMurdo and win the latter's affection.
    Oddly, as it appeared to me then, it was McMurdo who was sullen and gloomy. On three occasions he declined the offer of a cigarette from his opponent, and was short in his manner - one might almost say surly - when Harold Pickering, nine down at the ninth, said that it was well worth anyone's while being beaten by Sidney McMurdo because, apart from the fresh air and exercise, it was such an artistic treat to watch his putting.
    It was as he paid this graceful tribute that the crowd, which had been melting away pretty steadily for the last quarter of an hour, finally disappeared. By the time Sidney McMurdo had holed out at the tenth for a four that gave him the match, we were alone except for the caddies. These having been paid off, we started to walk back.
    To lose a championship match by ten and eight is an experience calculated to induce in a man an introspective silence, and I had not expected Harold Pickering to contribute much to any feast of reason and flow of soul which might enliven the homeward journey. To my surprise, however, as we started to cross the bridge which spans the water at the eleventh, he burst into animated speech, complimenting his conqueror in a graceful way which I thought very sporting.
    "I wonder if you will allow me to say, Mr. McMurdo," he began, "how greatly impressed I have been by your performance this afternoon. It has been a genuine revelation to me. It is so seldom that one meets a man who, while long off the tee, also plays an impeccable short game. I don't want to appear fulsome, but it seems to me that you have everything."
    Words like these should have been music to Sidney McMurdo's ears, but he merely scowled darkly and uttered a short grunt like a bulldog choking on a piece of steak.
    "In fact, I don't mind telling you,