My father always claimed that it was he and Passmore Edwards who had introduced golf into the South of England. I do not press the point, not being sure of the view that may be taken of the matter on the Day of Judgment. Perhaps he was only boasting. They used to play it on the sands at Westward Ho. My father, at the time, was farming land the other side of the river, above Instow. Westward Ho was then a wild stretch of desolate sealand bounded on the north by the great pebble ridge. They used it as a bunker at low tide. It must have taken some getting over. I shared the ground floor of number nineteen Tavistock Place with a chum, George Wingrave by name. The rooms above us were occupied by two sisters. The elder was the mistress of a gentleman who is now a well-known member of Parliament, in addition to being a magistrate, inclined to deal severely with human faults and frailties. She committed suicide a day or two after he was married. I remember our quaint little old landlady, Mrs. Peedles—“Mrs. P.” George and I always called her for short—bursting in upon me with a white, scared face while I was writing. We found her unconscious, her sister kneeling by the sofa holding her in her arms; but she died before we could get help. Fortunately for our present well-known legislator, his father was a man of means and influence. “An overdose of morphia” was, I think, the verdict. It came out that she had been suffering from sleeplessness. She had been a quiet, reserved girl. The younger sister was religious.

So soon as we were alone, Philip re-introduced the subject of reminiscences. Asking me not to talk about it, he told me he had done the very thing we had decided to be impossible—had kept a diary, writing down the thoughts that came to him, his dreams and desires. Or, to speak more strictly, typing them. Since his blindness, he had become marvellously proficient on the typewriter. It was a curious mixture, this diary, according to his own account.