“If you remember,” I said, “I told you long ago that that was all there was room for, but you would persist in making it nine.”

“The hole,” said James, “is the water-butt.  You have to get into that.  By the way, your balls are floaters, I hope?”

“Only six of ’em,” I said.  “However, I dare say you won’t mind if I grub up a few potatoes to carry on with afterwards.  So we hole out in the water-butt?  That’s the tiddleywinks part of it, I suppose?  Go on.”

“There are various penalties,” he explained.  “If you get among the potatoes, you add ten to your strokes and start again at the tee.  If you are bunkered in the raspberries, you lift out—­”

“Step back three paces out of sight and pick one over your left shoulder?” I inquired hopefully.  “I shall often find myself in the raspberry hazard.”

“And if,” concluded James sternly, “you are so clumsy as not to avoid the cucumber-frames—­”

“Say no more,” I begged.  “I understand.  I shall ask for the time-table, shake hands, thank you for a most delightful visit, and express my regrets that any little contretemps should have arisen to hasten my departure.”

“—­you add fifty to your strokes.  Five for the marrows and the rhubarb—­in each case returning to the tee.”

“And the artichokes,” I asked, surveying a thick forest of them guarding the right flank of the water-butt—­“what is their market value?”

“No penalty,” said James grimly, “except staying there till you get out.”

“One last piece of information.  What is bogey for this hole?”

“About two hundred, I think,” said James; “but no doubt you’ll lower it.”

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “That’s about my usual at the old game.”  And therewith I made my tee, drove and went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf.
       * * * * *
After hoeing the vegetables with a mashie for a hot two hours, I fought my way out of the rhubarb on all fours, with a golf-ball between my teeth, and then strode doggedly back to the tee and drove into the virgin artichoke forest.  While I toyed there with the sub-soil, the unwearied James went to earth among the marrows.  Hastily I heeled my ball into the ground (to be retrieved by James months later and announced as a curious scientific result of growing artichokes on a golf course), uttered a cry of triumph, and strolled out into the open.

“A hundred and seventy-nine.  My game, I think,” I announced.

James extricated himself and walked with me to the butt.

“Hullo!” I said, “it’s sunk.  Thought it was a floater.  It ought to be for a half-crown ball.”

“You mustn’t lose it,” said James suspiciously.  “Well let off the water and get it out.”

“No, no,” I protested.  “It’s not one that I really valued.  Oh, very well,” I added indifferently, feeling in my pocket for a non-floater.

James stooped to open the tap, and I popped the new ball in unobtrusively.