It was a warm afternoon and Wallace laid aside his thin jacket.  He was dressed in a tennis suit which fitted him perfectly.  Bishop called me aside.

“That chap has two or three trunks full of all kinds of clothes,” he said in a whisper, “but this is the first time I ever saw this one.  What do you call it?”

“That’s a tennis suit,” I said.

“Tennis!” he grunted.  “That’s worse than golf, isn’t it, Jack?”

I laughed, and then we turned our attention to the young Scotchman.

The moment he grasped my driver and swung it with an easy but powerful wrist movement I knew he was an expert.  You can almost pick the good golfer by the way he takes a club from a bag.  His skill is shown in his manner of teeing a ball, and no duffer ever “addressed” the sphere or “waggled” his club so as to deceive those who know the game.

Wallace did not tee the ball on any raised inequality of the turf, but simply placed it on a smooth spot, such as one would select as the average brassie lie.  If I had any lingering doubt as to his ability, this one preliminary act dispelled it.

Now that I calmly recall this scene in that sheep pasture, its dramatic grotesqueness rather appeals to me.  Here were three young ladies, all of them pretty, all wealthy and holding high social positions, watching with bated breath a farmhand of unknown birth in the act of striking a golf ball.  Surely golf is the great leveller!  Perhaps it is the hope of the ultimate democracy; the germ of the ideal brotherhood of man.

I presume Bishop was thinking that Wallace would better be employed in running a mowing machine.

“The Scotch method of making a full drive,” said Wallace, facing his interested little audience, and speaking with more enthusiasm than was his wont, “or, if you prefer it, the St. Andrews style, is distinguished from most types by what might be termed its exaggerated freedom.  It is a full, free swing with an abandoned follow through.  It probably comes from the confidence which has been handed down from generations of golf-playing people.  The Scotch are a conservative and deliberate people in most things, but the way they seem to hit a golf ball gives to most observers the impression of carelessness and lack of considered effort.  That, I should say,” he concluded, with a droll smile, “is enough for the preacher.”

[Illustration:  “I have never seen a more perfect shot”]

I felt mortally certain Wallace would make a failure of that first shot, and he told me later he was rather nervous, but he took no unnecessary chances.

He used a three-quarter swing—­at least so it appeared to me—­such a one I should employ to drive a low ball about one hundred and fifty yards.  He seemed to put no effort into it, but the result proved there was not an ounce of misapplied energy.  It all seemed unstudied, but I knew that every muscle and sinew of his lithe and well-proportioned body was working to the end that the face of his club should not swerve by one hair’s breadth from the course he had planned for it.