I see
clearly before me the solid phalanx of men from Missouri, some urging
me to tell it to the King of Denmark, others insisting that I produce
my Eskimos. Nevertheless, I do not shrink. I state once more that in
his thirty-first year Archibald Mealing went in for a golf
championship, and won it.
* * * * *
Archibald belonged to a select little golf club, the members of which
lived and worked in New York, but played in Jersey. Men of substance,
financially as well as physically, they had combined their superfluous
cash and with it purchased a strip of land close to the sea. This land
had been drained--to the huge discomfort of a colony of mosquitoes
which had come to look on the place as their private property--and
converted into links, which had become a sort of refuge for incompetent
golfers. The members of the Cape Pleasant Club were easygoing refugees
from other and more exacting clubs, men who pottered rather than raced
round the links; men, in short, who had grown tired of having to stop
their game and stand aside in order to allow perspiring experts to whiz
past them. The Cape Pleasant golfers did not make themselves slaves to
the game. Their language, when they foozled, was gently regretful
rather than sulphurous. The moment in the day's play which they enjoyed
most was when they were saying: 'Well, here's luck!' in the club-house.
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