I have played many games in my time, but I confidently say that for a test of nerve, golf is far the most trying game in the world, and next to it billiards. I do not pretend to say that an average player is always "off" with this or that club, but as every golfer knows there come times or spells of times when all skill with one class of club seems to vanish. The man of thirty in a few years will very likely develop into a really bad putter, not because he has not the skill-for he proved his skill when a beginner-but because he has learnt the terrors of putting, and his skill is overpowered by his nerves. Don't let a youth suppose that, because a golfer of great skill is a victim to one or more of these fads, it is necessary that he should be so also. In a long hole of over four hundred yards, the golfer need not bother his head about strength for the first two strokes; he has to hit both these as hard as he can-there is no nice calculation of less or more. Unless the cue ball passes the head string before that touch, the shot is a foul when the cue ball is in hand behind the head string, and the first ball it contacts is also behind the head string.

To get started, you'll need essential equipment like cue sticks, balls, and a billiards table. The player pocketed the cue ball. The young player is strong and feels capable of anything as far as distance and power are concerned: he might remove mountains with his driver and brassey, but in his heart he would not object to let his caddie approach and hole out for him. Take a stroke of eighty yards and one of forty, the mashie or some sort of lofted iron would be used for both these shots; and yet a player knows that at one distance he has a good chance of making a good stroke, at the other distance his heart goes into his boots. I know perfectly well that a man may feel unutterably nervous before he goes in to bat at cricket, but his nervousness goes when he has scored twenty runs, what is billiards and been in half-an-hour. But when you are fifty yards from the hole, and a bunker yawning between you and it, or when you have to lay an approach putt of twenty yards more or less dead to win or halve a hole, then the question of nerve becomes everything, because strength is everything.

You cannot win a match if you approach and putt badly; but there are some courses, Sandwich, for instance, where you may just as well go home as dream of winning a match or making a respectable score if you are "off" your driving. I watched a final match once in the amateur championship, in which two most distinguished amateurs were struggling for the mastery, and both drove and played through the green as well as could be desired, and both putted in a way that a charity-school boy would have been ashamed of. If you watch an amateur billiard-player in a handicap before a crowd, you will soon see whether he is nervous by the way he judges the strength. 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 easy always to judge by the eye whether a green is faster or slower than its immediate predecessor. Then there is a third one which is the oldest, a fourth one distinguished for scholarship, a fifth for athletic records, a sixth because it has the finest chapel, a seventh for I know not what, and as there are at least fifteen of them, I have mixed them all up; I see only the castellated palaces in Perpendicular style, the huge quadrangles, where the pupils move about in black gowns and square tasselled caps, each of whom has his two or three rooms in the wings of these castles; I see the Gothic chapels disembowelled by Protestantism, the banquet-halls with a dais for the "masters" and "fellows," the venerable smoked portraits of earls, statesmen and poets, who went forth from there; I see the renowned "backs," i.e. the rear of the colleges above the river Cam, over which there are bridges leading to the ancient college parks; I float on the gentle river between the "backs" and the parks, and I think of our students, of their hollow bellies and their boots down-at-heel with trudging from lecture to lecture.

The game is played with three balls, two white and one red, with one of the white balls having a small red dot, or spot, to distinguish it. The red balls are worth one point each, while the yellow is worth two, the green three, the brown four, the blue five, the pink six, and the black seven. He is on a smooth green which looks so fast that it terrifies him, while if it should slope slightly down hill he is more terrified still. Pockets: Snooker tables also have six pockets, but the pockets are narrower and more challenging to pocket balls into, requiring greater precision. Now it is only the best players who are masters equally of five or six clubs, and I doubt if this can be said truly even of them. Straight pool, also known as 14.1 continuous, is a game where players must pocket a set number of balls to reach a predetermined score. There is another reason why golf is a greater test of nerve than billiards, and that is the variety of weapons that you must have for different strokes. Finally there is the case of billiards, not a game that is very closely allied to cricket, but one from which much may be learned.