A Midsummer Night's Dream

Golf is an all-round-the-year game, and deservedly so, but it would be a mistake to suppose that with billiards it is otherwise.

For two or three months the professionals cease to play, as they must have their holidays like other people. And it may also be that, at a time when all the world is on outdoor pleasure bent, there is not sufficient vogue for exhibition billiards to warrant the match halls being continuously open.

But even in the heart of the billiard season the billiards that is seen in match halls is a very minute fraction of the billiards that is going on in every city, town, suburb, large village, country residence, club, hotel, and public billiard room in the Kingdom, and in these places, and others not enumerated, billiards is turned to as the shades of evening gather, almost as freely in July and August as at any other part of the year.

The golfer gladly faces weather of all kinds in the winter for the sake of his beloved sport, and the billiard player, when the summer comes, yields not one jot to the golfer from the point of view of enthusiasm. Often, as with Mr. S. H. Fry, the keen golfer and billiard player are embodied in the same person, and at numberless golf club-houses, in the summer time, perhaps, more than in the winter, when the golf ceases billiards begins.

Similarly, as one passes the open windows of seaside hotels and where not late on a summer evening, one has not long to wait and listen before hearing the seductive click of the musical ivory sphere.

The picture, to which we have given the title "A Midsummer Night's Dream," might, perhaps, have been entitled, with equal apposite-ness, "The Somnambulist," with the sub-heading:"On Which Green?" or "Under Which King?" Quite clearly the enthusiast whose dreams of past happy breaks or holeings-out have caused him, still unawake, to roam the house and to mix up putter and cue, hardly knows whether he ought to be oft with his winter love because he is on with his summer lure, and his indecision is akin to that of many others as outdoor attractions make their increasing, although by no means sole, appeal.