They are generally very old, always dirty, while the butler is as ancient as the bungalow. He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. To prove how much nerve is the first, second, and third necessity in putting, you may take a man of thirty years old who has been and perhaps still is a good cricketer, and has a good eye for games generally. You can let anything grow upon you if you permit it to do so, and why should we expect a man to have disciplined himself in his youth to avoid gluttony or any other pleasing vice, and not have feelings of scorn for the golfer who has allowed every absurd fad to take such possession of him that he is a slave to them, and an annoyance to himself and a nuisance to his fellow-creatures. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dâk-bungalows. Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives in India acted itself in dâk-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts.

A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dâk-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dâk-bungalows, that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts. MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY. I lived in "converted" ones-old houses officiating as dâk-bungalows-where nothing was in its proper place and there wasn't even a fowl for dinner. A funeral is not an exciting or particularly pleasant occupation, but there are many funerals where a dead silence is not more cultivated than at some golf matches; and it is stupid and useless to fly into a passion because somebody thirty or forty yards off who is not playing golf at all, or at any rate has nothing to do with you, talks or laughs so that you must hear him. The butler, who was nearly bent double with old age, said so. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses "repeats" on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for some sorrowful ones; there are Officers' Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawar possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something-not fever-wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad.

Such cases, however, are painfully common, and like Jorrocks, we can only implore ingenuous youth to try and avoid these pitfalls, and realise while still young and in the heyday of his success, that the inevitable hour must come sooner or later, and make it a duty to meet it with philosophic calm. But I never can open my lips-and it isn't often, goodness knows! 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. 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.

You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one. In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. No matter how consistent you are with the first shot (the break), the smallest of differences in the speed and angle with which you strike the white ball will cause the pack of billiards to scatter in wildly different directions every time. Billiards is not only about skill but also about showing respect to your opponents and fellow players. In billiards every stroke requires thought of the question of strength; even a safety miss may easily be altogether defeated in its object if played too hard or too soft. The branch of fractal mathematics, pioneered by the French American mathematician Benoît Mandelbröt, allows us to come to grips with the preferred behaviour of this system, even as the incredibly intricate shape of the attractor prevents us from predicting exactly how the system will evolve once it reaches it. Basic Play Each turn is called a ‘break’ and consists of a series of strikes of the cue ball that come to an end when a player makes a non-scoring strike or a foul stroke.

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