"Well, young fellah, when you do you'll learn that once fairly
out on a round, it would take the crack of doom to stop a true
golfer. Halloa! There's that telephone-bell again."

From time to time during and after lunch the high, insistent
ring had summoned the Professor. He gave us the news as it came
through to him in a few curt sentences. Such terrific items had
never been registered in the world's history before. The great
shadow was creeping up from the south like a rising tide of
death. Egypt had gone through its delirium and was now comatose.
Spain and Portugal, after a wild frenzy in which the Clericals
and the Anarchists had fought most desperately, were now fallen
silent. No cable messages were received any longer from South
America. In North America the southern states, after some
terrible racial rioting, had succumbed to the poison. North of
Maryland the effect was not yet marked, and in Canada it was
hardly perceptible. Belgium, Holland, and Denmark had each in
turn been affected. Despairing messages were flashing from every
quarter to the great centres of learning, to the chemists and
the doctors of world-wide repute, imploring their advice. The
astronomers too were deluged with inquiries. Nothing could be
done. The thing was universal and beyond our human knowledge or
control. It was death--painless but inevitable--death for young
and old, for weak and strong, for rich and poor, without hope or
possibility of escape. Such was the news which, in scattered,
distracted messages, the telephone had brought us. The great
cities already knew their fate and so far as we could gather
were preparing to meet it with dignity and resignation. Yet here
were our golfers and laborers like the lambs who gambol under
the shadow of the knife. It seemed amazing. And yet how could