even to deceive ourselves.

Thus does this score counting and this yearning for one’s record round breed a moral cowardice in such men. There is only one score to count, and that is the one which would be passed according to the rules of stroke play. If golfers must count scores they must be just to themselves, and they must not even temper their justice with any mercy, for the laws of golf are inexorable, and in them there is no mercy.

IX

There are many who hold that the most exasperating opponent of all is he who is afflicted with an amazing indecision when about to make his very shortest putts. For a minute he will stand with his putter to the ball as if in abject fear of his fate, and surely at such a time there are strange fancies flying through his brain. They must be like the fancies of a drowning man. It was agreed among a company of his friends that these must be the jerky thoughts of such a man whom they well know when he was engaged gloomily upon the dreaded task of putting a ball that lay eighteen inches from the hole, the little patch of putting green that intervened being perfectly smooth and level:—

X

Some of those cantankerous people who have no sympathy with games, and but a limited confidence in the wise precept that the healthy mind is most frequently to be found in association with the healthy body—practical people they like to call themselves—will sometimes ask you what is the good of golf. It is generally useless to attempt to humour them by advancing the proposition that it returns a dividend of fifty per cent. in mental and physical efficiency, and seventy-five in the general happiness of the subject.

What are really the least convincing examples of the practical value of golf are the most effective in argument against such folks. With them it may count a word in favour of the game that a man once playing it found that his ball from a full drive came to rest on a sixpence which had evidently dropped through a hole in the pocket of a previous player. Here, indeed, was a material practical gain! They will be impressed also with the possibilities of the game when they are told a little story of how a man, who was not in quest of art treasures at the time, discovered an old master accidentally, and entirely through the medium of his golf. It was in this way. A Montreal art dealer was playing the game on a country course one day in 1903, when he sliced a ball so badly that away it went through the window of a cottage hard by. Thereupon there came out from it an old lady, a French Canadian, who was possessed of remarkable power of speech, of which the golfer was given much evidence. Presently, when her attack was somewhat exhausted, the poor golfer offered to recompense her for the damage done to the window; but then it was put to him that the broken glass was not the only casualty. The ball, after passing through the window, had continued its course of destruction by breaking the glass that covered the picture; and without making any examination of the nature of this damage the player agreed that he would give a matter of a pound for the picture besides paying for the broken window. This soothed the feelings of the lady of the cottage, and she pressed upon him the picture, for the damage to which he had paid so handsomely. He took it away with him, and at home in the evening he was led in a spirit of curiosity to make some examination of it, when, to his astonishment, he discovered that it was a Dutch interior by Teniers, which he sold a few days later for £500. To the credit of this golfer be it said, he sent a cheque for half the amount to the cottager. This is an excellent story to tell to the absurd and practical people, and a true one.

It might be of service to add to it an account of a shot that was played on one occasion by a gentleman of no less scientific importance than Professor John Milne, who is known as a great seismologist, the man who is most in evidence when earthquakes are troubling. When the earth is still the Professor will leave his instruments in the Isle of Wight to their own care for a period, and he will wander away to the links for some golf. To what great feat has the golf of this professor led him? Why, he of all men became the first to drive a golf ball across the Victoria Falls on the Zambesi River—a hundred and sixty yards of roaring, foaming water. That was when the British Association went for its annual meeting to South Africa, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the celebrated Cambridge pathologist, was so much impressed by the achievement, that he too attempted to drive the Zambesi, and succeeded. But these are the things that may be done by Professors once, and not always. Two more balls were teed on the bank, and the Professors smote them with their clubs, but those balls were claimed by the Zambesi, and perchance they have been digested by the crocodiles. Now here you have something done by golf which was not golf, but which marked the advance of civilisation into the dark regions of the African continent. Our practical friends must allow this to the credit of the game, not only for the achievement in itself, but for the possibilities that it suggests, for is not a picture at once conjured up of the resourceful golfer driving a ball from the shore to a sinking ship, when all other means of establishing communication therewith had failed? To the ball there will be tied a silken thread, and the thread will help a string across, and the string will drag a rope. Thus must we plead for golf!

While in these serious aspects of the battle of life the game is thus to come to our aid, it shall be of similar service also in the gentler paths. Once upon a time a maker of golf balls told me how he had suspected a rival of putting cores from old balls made by him A into all so-called new ones made by the rival B. Therefore A for a little while wound a tiny piece of tissue paper with the rubber of his cores, and on the paper there was written A’s name and address. Some time later the tissues came home again through the medium of the balls that bore the name of B. There was this damning evidence of the pilfering of the cores. This story is not told as a hint to the trade, but surely it will convey one to ingenious persons who wish for a mode of secret communication with others which will be sure and safe. May it not be that some Romeo of to-day has already come by the device of lofting a ball or two on to the balcony of the fair Juliet, who in the seclusion of her chamber may be discovered in operation upon the cover with hair-pins and fire-irons, and presently in raptures upon the endearments expressed in the billet doux of her Romeo?

Perhaps it will not avail us as golfers to tell our practical friends that the principles of the application of physical force which have been taught us in the game, as of the steady body, the fixed centre of movement, and of the hand being under the constant leadership of the eye, have benefited us not merely in the playing of other games, such as billiards and tennis, but in the attainment of greater proficiency in some of the most practical and useful of domestic occupations, so that the man of all others who may be depended upon to hang up the pictures in a new house as pictures should be hanged, is the golfer who has got his handicap down to 6. We will tell also to the critic of our game that it affords a scope for a kind of humour that is of occasional service to some wits and others. It helps them to raise a laugh over the tea-cups when they say that they will take the odd or two more in sugar. We do not like this jugglery with the terms, and it is only to be excused in such exceptional cases as when the doctor tells the new golfer that his temperature is 99° and the patient inquires anxiously as to what the bogey is; or when, in discussing the frowning fortunes of some unfortunate acquaintance who has had a hard time in life, and is called upon for severe labour in his last days, it is said of this poor chap that he is playing the nineteenth hole and has made an indifferent drive. But, in seriousness, we like our golf to be kept sacred to itself, and unassociated with the generally duller pursuits of this workaday world.

XI

Is there not a considerable superstition of the links? Even great players have old clubs that they carry about with them, not so much for their practical value as for the luck of the thing, as they fancy it; and a man once said at Prestwick that he always carried in his bag a queer-shaped iron, though he never used it in these days. This was because on one famous occasion many years before, when he was seven down with eight to play, and won the match by a brilliancy that did not belong to him, he could only account for it by the circumstance that this club had somehow found its way into his bag by accident. As a small acknowledgment to the gods, and a hint that such favours would be welcome in the future, he vowed that he would carry that club with him on the links for evermore, but that never would he play with it. And he keeps his vow most steadfastly, to the irritation of the burdened caddie.

Some sentiment clings to that cleek belonging to Mr. Edward Blackwell, which, it has been said, is “shaped like an old boot,” but which, as we all know, has done work upon which any cleek might be congratulated. And is it not declared that before Mr. Travis set out to play in the championship at Sandwich, Ben Sayers lent to him for mascot his favourite spoon?

Other golfers have other fancies. Some have it that it is unlucky to go out to play without a supply of money, for then surely shall the half-crown be lost; and others fear that it might go hardly with them if they had not the company of their favourite pipe. On severely important occasions, Andrew Kirkaldy will hie himself beforehand to his tobacconists in St. Andrews and buy himself a new pipe for luck. Does not special fortune attach to special golfing clothes, and is not the light grey jacket that which brings most luck? Think of all the fine players who jacket themselves in this way with darker wear below, which is out of the usual order. Mr. Hilton has a jacket which goes always with him as the lamb went with Mary, and has thus played its part in championships innumerable. This is a jacket that has won its place in golfing history.

The superstitions about the winning of certain holes are stupid and general. Why is it such an unfortunate thing with some people to win the first hole? And yet do they always try to win, and do not bemoan their fate if they lose. A trifle more reason, perhaps, is there in the old couplet:

But of course matches have been won when the winner was two up with five to go, hundreds and thousands of them. There is one man of high championship rank who has a list of exceptions to this rule, which he applies for his own consolation when the fates decree that he shall be two holes to the good as he stands upon the fourteenth tee. If it suits him, he will put it that the spell will not work if it happened that he fluked the thirteenth with a long putt; and he holds upon suitable occasion that it has nothing to do with a foursome. One may suppose that the essence of the idea is that the man who is two up at this state of the game is just short of being in nearly the strongest position possible, and is sometimes a little inclined to be slack in consequence; and then, if he loses the next hole, and is only one up with four to go, a sudden fear seizes him: he feels that he must fight for his life, becomes flurried, presses—and then the rest of the tale is soon told. But the best and the worst of the proverb lies in its recitation by the man who is down when his opponent, bold in confidence, is taking the honour at the fourteenth.

It must be held as an unfortunate thing to play a ball into a graveyard, and it is better, perhaps, that one’s attention should not be called to the memorial stone hard by the eleventh tee at Deal, which tells of a foul murder committed upon some fair maiden at this spot in the long ago when Deal was unacquainted with the game that has given her fame.

We hear that the most famous lady players carry charms when engaged in their most important games. She who won fame as Miss Rhona Adair is said to have invariably worn a particular ribbon with a gruesome device of skull and crossbones upon it whenever she very much wanted to win her match. White heather is supposed to be a most potent charm, and it has been told as a secret that some ladies decline to wash their hands between rounds, though luncheon comes in the interval, lest evil should befall them afterwards.

THE WANDERING PLAYER

I

The golfers and other people who know nothing of St. Andrews are often inclined to fancy that some of the enthusiasm professed by those who have a tolerable golfing acquaintance with it is affected, because it “is the proper thing,” and because it harmonises with the feelings of many revered members of the old school of the game. Perhaps such scepticism is pardonable, particularly when it is known that there have been many hundreds of golfers who have gone to St. Andrews once and failed to be impressed by it, and have not hesitated to declare their doubts about its supremacy on their return to their native links. These people belong to one of three classes. The first is the smallest of the three, consisting of good golfers of sound discrimination, whose idiosyncrasies of taste lead them honestly to the conclusion that St. Andrews is greatly overrated, and that it has superiors in various other greens. The second and largest batch is composed of men who lack both the necessary golfing knowledge and the true golfing spirit. The third consists of those who have not had sufficient time to know, for verily St. Andrews is, to a large extent, a cultivated taste, and there are many worthy golfers to whom its first appeal has not been entirely convincing. There is a more or less vague something that attracts instantly, but the rest only comes to the Southron stranger after two or three, or even more, visits of fairly long duration.

The English golfer does not generally love St. Andrews at first sight, but he shows that interest in her which leads him to talk about her and awakens the suspicions of his friends. Then he may speak of her with indifference, but he goes back to her again and again, and at last one day, when he returns to his home after one of these visits, he feels an exquisite soreness at heart, a sweet longing, a strange exaltation, and he knows that a change has come over his golfing life, that he is at last in love with St. Andrews, and that he cannot do without her. Forthwith his plans for future golfing expeditions are changed and modified. He must now always think of St. Andrews. If he is a man of leisure he must go there at least once a year, and even if he has but little time to spare he will be going to Scotland once in a twelvemonth with his bag of clubs, and must so arrange his itinerary that he shall touch Leuchars Junction going or coming, and shall run down that little strip of railway which makes to the golfer the finest travelling in the world, for two or three days of heartening play on the premier links. All golf is good, but there is something subtle about the St. Andrews golf which makes it not quite like the other, and the man who learns to love it, though the love come in his riper years, when the emotions are slow of action and may be weak in result, is faithful to it for the rest of his golfing days.

Probably no man has been able completely to define the charm of the place. Its charm is of its golf, for though it has some natural beauty, and is greatly historic and of celebrity for its ruins, it casts no enduring spell over the man who does not know the use of a driver. The constant talk of it and its tradition has something to do with the charm, no doubt. The stranger, who has never struck a ball there, feels something of nervous ecstasy as he hears the brakes go on the train that slows down on its approach to the station. There, during the last two minutes of his journey, is a view of the links, the Swilcan Burn, the players going out to the second and approaching the seventeenth—and there goes a ball on to that famous road!—just like the fathers of golf used to do in the olden days as it is written in the books. Then, walking in St. Andrews, one seems to breathe golf as never before. All the men and boys one sees are players or caddies; there is a knot of men at the street-corner talking about the 76 that one of the professionals did in his evening round; there are many golf shops; it is all golf. On the walls, and in the hotels and post offices, there are displayed official notices, giving the warning that those who play on the course with irons only, or who practise putting on the eighteenth green, may be fined 20s. or—wonderful enactment!—be sent to prison for a period. A personage of no less consequence than a Cabinet Minister, this being Mr. Asquith, has been stopped under this rule. The pipes that one hears seem to be skirling a song of the greatness of the game and the glory of the men who used to play it here in the olden days. Above all, one comes instantly by a deep sense as of walking on hallowed ground, of being one of the heirs to a great heritage in golf, and to a great responsibility. Life and the game are stronger things than they used to be. That same subtle oppression of soul is felt as when one has a first glance at the Pyramids or at the tomb of the great Napoleon in the Invalides. These things stand for what was a great might, and in its golf St. Andrews is truly mighty.

And so it comes that the spirit of the game seems to brood over this hallowed spot, and stirs the golfer with fine imaginings and gives to him great impulses. It is all so different from anything else. On the evening of his first day he knows that St. Andrews is not like the other places, and when, after his first rest, he kisses the morning, he is glad and he is exalted, because he is at St. Andrews, and there is not a man or woman in the place who will not talk to him of the game that he loves and sympathise with him in his ardour. The golfer has come home at last.

It is difficult to describe the merits of the wonderful old course. It is there. The people who do not know it cannot be made to understand, and the people who do know it have not to be told. It would be hard for anybody to prove that it is not the best, if the severest, test of scientific golf. Nothing but scientific golf will avail the player here. Of late years people have been railing against the bunkers on the course, and the increase thereof; but after all it is to be remembered that the placing of the majority of these bunkers has been the result of the aggregate of thought of some of the best golfers in the world for a period of scores of years, and they must be considered in the spirit that Mr. John Low suggests, that no bunker can really be unfair. It is there to be avoided, and it is the best shot that avoids it. No doubt this view might lead to awkward conclusions if pressed in some cases, but it is apparently sound as a general principle of scientific golf, as apart from the mere pastime and the sensual passion for hard hitting. If a bunker is in the middle of the course at just the distance of a good drive, it is obviously the duty of the driver to play to one side or the other and avoid it; and that is just the characteristic of proper play at nearly all of the St. Andrews holes, that the tee shot has not only to be cleanly played, and at the proper strength and so forth, but that over and above all these things it has to be so accurately placed as on no other course. Position means everything at St. Andrews, and the number and variety of the undulations of the course, the constant bunker, and the extreme diversity of the glorious putting greens and the approaches thereto, bring it about that a man may play a hole a thousand times and it has something new to offer him every time, and he might play rounds on this course all the time from his childhood to his old age, and those of his last years would be riper with interest than any that went before. Here, indeed, is a course for character; there is nothing like it.

II

Hoylake is new in comparison, but Hoylake is old for England, and it is the leader of golf in the southern section of the kingdom. Hoylake has fine traditions of its own which it would not exchange for those of any other centre or club, and while it has always had the most perfect respect for the dignity and the conservation of the game, it has occasionally shown a commendable disposition towards useful progress. It was the Royal Liverpool Club at Hoylake that took the initiative in the establishment of the Amateur Championship and the international matches; and at other times it has impelled St. Andrews towards unwilling, but necessary, action. The club may look back with pride upon the earnestness and dignity of its pioneers. They were true golfers of the old and most worthy school, and when they began the game there they had, as in some other old places, to take a pinch of sand out of the hole that they had just putted into in order to make a tee for their next drive.

By some it is said that it was the establishment of the links at Westward Ho! that gave the idea for making a golf course at Hoylake to the Liverpool golfers. Some of the people of West Kirby played there about the middle of the last century, and the Rabbit Warren, as the present links was then called, was used for golf about 1865. The Royal Liverpool Club was established four years later, and for twenty-six years, before the building of its present handsome clubhouse, was housed in the Royal Hotel.

In those days the course began on the hotel side, but with the change of residence there was some necessary changing of the order of the holes, the old first becoming the present last, the old second being now numbered the first, and the old last is the present seventeenth. The land of the links is leased from Lord Stanley of Alderley, whose ancestors acquired it in the time of Queen Elizabeth; and it is significant of the increasing richness of Hoylake, due largely to its golf, that the assessment upon the club by the union overseers, which used to be £165, was recently raised to £500.

In the quality of the golfers that it has produced Hoylake can challenge the whole world of golf. It alone has found an amateur winner for the Open Championship—two of them. It bred the inimitable Mr. John Ball, who has six times won the Amateur Championship—1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1899, and 1907—and is good enough to win it again; and he won the Open Championship in 1890, thus holding both titles at the same time, being the only golfer who has ever done so, and quite likely who ever will. A brass tablet in the entrance-hall and the clock over the clubhouse commemorate this achievement. Mr. Harold Hilton, winner of the Open Championship in 1892 and 1897, and the amateur event in 1900 and 1901; and Mr. John Graham, junr., one of the finest products of Hoylake, despite his insistence that he is a Scottish golfer when it comes to International rivalry, is now at the top of his game, and is good enough to win one Championship and very nearly another. So true is it that a fine course will breed fine players.

Of the quality of Hoylake there can be no two opinions. It is one of the very best courses in the world, and by common consent it and Deal are the two best in England. Hoylake is far better than it looks. The first hole is generally cited as being one of the best two-shot holes to be found anywhere, and it is always good, no matter where the wind is. The course looks easy. If you play thoroughly well it may not be difficult, but if you do not play well it rends your miserable game asunder. What the possibilities for failure are, were exemplified in a grossly exaggerated manner in the final for the Amateur Championship in 1906, when the finalists halved the sixth hole, which goes by the name of the Briars, in 9! They lost their heads, and a player needs his head at Hoylake. The course is famous for its putting greens. They are fine now; but they are not what they used to be, for in the old days they were so magnificent that it used to be said by everybody that it was a sin to walk upon them. The water has in late years been drawn from the land for the purposes of wells, and this has made a difference.

St. Andrews and Hoylake—a noble pair!

III

Choosing a companion for a golfing holiday is at all times a serious business, and the light and thoughtless manner in which some young people perform the task is, in the interests of their own future golfing welfare, deplorable. Young people are mentioned advisedly, for you do not find the old golfers making their selections hastily, and they do not live to regret those that they make as do the hot-blooded youths who are swayed by the fancies of a moment. These select at haste, and often enough they repent bitterly before the golfing trip is over. The same nice discrimination should be exercised in the choice of such a companion as would be, or ought to be, in the choice of a wife, and many of the points that have to be taken into consideration are similar. As a general principle, youth should not mate with age for the purposes of many days’ golf in their own exclusive company away from home, when the twain are cast upon their own joint resources and have their pleasure and their welfare bound up with each other. It is a good thing that there should have been a long and tolerably thorough acquaintance beforehand, and there should be some approximate equality in playing ability. The partners to this important contract should be satisfied above all things that not only are their ideas and ideals concerning the good game largely alike, and their tastes outside the game agreeable to each other, but that their temperaments agree to the point that they can make the necessary allowances for each other’s waywardness of conduct, when in the interests of continued concord it becomes imperatively necessary that this should be done. Trials of this kind will have to be endured, and it is well that there should be a firm resolution beforehand to bear with each other’s weaknesses, satisfied always of the high value of the man. Some old golfers have said, and wisely, that it is a good thing to go away on a golfing holiday with a man and never to golf with him—to get the game with others, and to talk of it with the companion of the trip at breakfast in the morning and at dinner when the play for the day is over; and there can be little doubt that in this maxim there is much wisdom, though it is not necessary to carry the recommendation to the extreme. Too much familiarity with the game of one man breeds some contempt for it, even though it be a game that is more remunerative in holes than that possessed by the other; and while there are no rivals like old rivals, still, if their rivalry is uninterrupted it becomes dull and uninteresting.

IV

There is an old golfer who says that it cost him many weeks of failure, and many hundreds of pounds, to come by that experience in conducting a golfing holiday as enabled him to make a complete success of such always afterwards. For the benefit of others of the smallest experience, who are liable to err grievously, he offers the following precepts:—

“However keen one may be, and however much one may enjoy the excellent golf that is obtained on a good seaside course, it is a great mistake to play too much during a short holiday, and failure to appreciate this fact has completely spoiled more golfing holidays than any other cause. The early keenness is followed by carelessness, and after a while the game becomes somewhat of a taskmaster. Then one’s game suffers severely, and even a strong physical constitution is hardly equal to three rounds a day kept up constantly. Yet that is what many holiday golfers try to do, and when they have finished their vacation they are sick of the mention of golf, and wish they had gone fishing or shooting instead. My advice is never to play more than two rounds a day, and to play no golf at all on two days of the week; whilst, if the holiday lasts a month, the man will be all the better for a four or five days’ rest in the middle of it. He will then enjoy all his golf, and the entire holiday will be much more of a success.

“On a holiday course, where there are many visitors, one sees a greater variety of clubs and golfing implements than anywhere else, and numerous novelties of a more or less attractive character. However favourably many of these ideas may strike you, do your best to resist the inclination to invest in them, because, if you once begin doing this, you will have a dreadful quantity of rubbish to take home. A golfer who thinks several times before he buys a new club when he is at home, somehow seems to be a very irresponsible creature when he is holidaying, and will purchase wonderful brasseys, niblicks, and putters at the slightest provocation.

“As soon as you get on to your holiday seaside course, don’t make the mistake of beginning to play for larger money stakes than you are accustomed to do on your home links, even when you are invited to do so and you may feel it difficult to refuse. Comparatively small beginnings in this direction have a way of developing before the holiday is far advanced into gambling on the game to an extent that the player cannot afford. Apart from this important view of the matter, the pleasure of playing the game is completely ruined. A ball on the match is enough for anybody, no matter what balance he may have at his bank, and in starting a golfing holiday a man will be wise to make up his mind in advance that he will not play for more.

“When you are a complete stranger and alone, and you beg the club steward that he will find you matches, do not hesitate when he offers you an opponent, even though the latter’s handicap is either too large or too small to give you the most enjoyable match. Take him on at once, and be thankful. The steward, who is always an obliging fellow, has a rather difficult task in suiting everybody, and you should be greatly obliged for the favour he does you in supplying you with any kind of match.

“If you are a long-handicap foozler, make your start for the round either very early in the morning or very late, say nine o’clock or half-past eleven. Either of these times is just as good as half-past ten, and you will miss the crowd, have a clear course, and spare yourself the anxiety of being a constant annoyance to the scratch men behind you if you started at the busy time. You will play a much better game.

“At the commencement don’t announce your handicap as either more or less than what it is at home, whatever your views upon the accuracy of the latter may be. If you say your handicap is more than it really is, you are grossly dishonest and a cheat, though some misguided players do so without any full sense of the grave responsibility of their action. On the other hand, many players with the best of motives say they are several strokes less than they really are, for the purpose of seeing what they can really do at a shorter handicap, and thus, as they put it, pull their game out. They also do it with the object of getting better matches, but their sins will find them out. They may very likely lose most of their matches, and their opponents, perhaps, will not care to play with them again, wanting something more to do. Besides, they may run up against some of their own club fellows, and then they may look rather foolish.

“Don’t give your newly-made opponent-friend a long account of your many brilliant performances on your home course, particularly if the account is by way of being an excuse for your falling off on the present occasion. The probability is that he will take a large discount off your story, and in any case he doesn’t care an old gutta what you do at home.

“Also, don’t make the shocking mistake of discussing with him the play and the manners of other visitors to the course with whom you have been having matches, or whom you have otherwise encountered on the green. It is very bad form, and, besides, after you have been denouncing some person or other, your companion may inform you that he is a friend of his.

“Don’t ask permission of your opponent to take your wife or your sister or your mother round the links with you to watch the match, even with the proviso that she shall keep at a convenient distance from you both. Like the good fellow he is sure to be, he will say at once that he will be delighted, and will be most agreeable. But would you be delighted, and would you play your best game in such circumstances? Would not the presence of a lady stranger rather irritate you, however gallant you might desire to be? And what if all the players on the links did this kind of thing? The proper place for ladies who do not play golf is the seashore.

“Do please remember that as a visitor to the links, even though you are made a temporary member, you have no right to be there, and are only admitted to the course by the courtesy of the members. This is a point in manners which is far too often neglected, and when the neglect is carried to an extreme the golfer may find his application for temporary membership refused another season. There must be no arrogance in your conduct in the clubhouse or on the green. Do not complain about the food or about the state of the course. You are not obliged to eat or to play there, and the members have got on very well in the past without you, and will doubtless survive your departure.

“Likewise remember that others who are playing on the course have at least as much right to do so as you, even if in your opinion they do not play such a high-class game as you do. Therefore don’t get into the habit of calling out ‘Fore!’ to the couple in front unless it is absolutely necessary to do so, and don’t complain loudly that people who take four putts on the green have no business to come to such good courses and interfere with the play of others.

“Assume that your opponent, though you do not know him well, is both a gentleman and a sportsman, as it is extremely likely is the case, and don’t allow any contrary idea to enter your mind unless the evidence in favour of it is overwhelming. Then say nothing about your suspicions, but simply make a convenient excuse when he asks you for another match.

“If a point of difficulty occurs in the course of your match, do not squabble with your opponent about the rules or stubbornly maintain your own position against his arguments. It is better to waive your point and even lose a hole than do so. You are unlikely to convince him, and it is quite possible that you yourself are in the wrong. Besides, you will score most heavily by gracefully waiving what you feel is your right. He will feel that afterwards.

“When you are leaving at the end of your holiday, do not forget to tender your best thanks to those to whom they are due. When you get home again don’t tell untruths about the great things you have done while on your holiday. The people to whom you tell them will not believe you. Indeed, you must be very careful as to how you tell the good part of the truth.”

V

When you are one of a special party that sets out for a sojourn at some place, solely for the reason of the golf that it affords, and when in due course, the time having been well and enjoyably spent on the links, your friends determine that they will return home or depart to some other place for golf, do not on any account yield to an impulse to stay behind them, on feeling that you could enjoy still a little more play, and persuading yourself that among the people you know who are staying in the place you may make up good matches. There will be no further enjoyment, for all the days that follow will suffer in comparison with those full ones that were spent when those bosom companions helped to the happiness in every hour. The course will not be the same; there will be a ghostly silence about the rooms of your lodging place, and the atmosphere of the town or village may seem unfriendly or at least indifferent; whereas before, in the independence of your association, you had not cared what it was, but formed a vague impression that the people were pleasantly conspiring to add to the comfort and the pleasure of this expedition.

On the first morning afterwards it does really seem that all the people who had stayed there had gone also, and not merely the three who had come with you. You breakfast perhaps alone in a vast apartment. The head waiter seems to mix a great sympathy with his attentions, suggesting that he appreciates the loneliness and the misery of your bereavement. Out of this wretched place to the clubhouse, and there is no one there, and the obliging secretary or steward is unable to give any definite information as to the prospects of a morning match. You take out a young professional, and, well though he plays, a poor thing is this match with him in comparison with those that were of the days before, when you knew always the thoughts and fears that were passing through the mind of your opponent, and knew almost as well as your own, the clubs with which he played his shots, and exactly how they did their work. The ghosts of your friends seem to walk in front of you down the fairway leading to every hole, and as you leave the putting green and go forward moodily to the next tee, there is the shadow form of one of them pointing with his club to the exact spot where you remember his ball was teed yesterday, and you feel momentarily a happier man as you think you can see his characteristic swing and the glint of joy that comes into his eyes as he finds he has made the carry that it needed a strong heart to attempt with this wind blowing back from the green. You do not wish to appear inconsiderate, and not to show yourself as a man of proper feeling and a good sportsman in the presence of another who can hardly display any open resentment at your attitude, but you cannot help this walking moodily and listlessly to the tee, as if not caring anything for the game that is in progress. There is no familiar talk on the old familiar topics. It is a relief when the match is ended, and you feel less pain at being beaten at the thirteenth hole than you have done for a long time.

“I can get a good match for you this afternoon, sir,” says that excellent steward when you go back into the clubhouse. “Oh, thanks very much, Brown,” you say, “but it doesn’t matter. I think I shall go back this afternoon.” And by the afternoon train you go, and as you are whirled along the seashore and through the open country and the tunnels, a first thought is that yesterday at the same time those three merry fellows were running along the same course, and were perhaps seated in that very carriage. They have gained a day on you in everything. Next time, my friends, we will all go back together.

VI

The customary classification of our golf courses into the inland and seaside groups is crude and inadequate. Apart from that there are many inland courses, and still more seaside courses, that differ from each other more than some in the one class differ from the others in the second one. The golfer of experience comes subconsciously to put all the courses that he knows well into different groups, those in each group having some distinguishing characteristic that specially appeals to his fancy or his style of play. The student of golfing architecture has no difficulty in separating the links that we know best into four or five clearly distinguished classes, or schools as we might call them. The contour and peculiarities of the country over which the course is laid are largely instrumental in determining the class to which each one belongs, but the hand of man makes the final decision, and so it is that on many good courses we have the quality exposed and the temperaments suggested of the great golfing architects of dying and dead generations. It may be that they had very unpliable materials with which to work; but after all in the planning of most holes there are two or three alternatives. One designer would determine that the golfers on his course should play over a high sand hill, while another would have inclined to avoiding it or fashioning another hole from another tee which would take the player round it.

One of the foremost of these schools of golf architecture is the Heroic. The name has only to be given, and every golfer of experience knows at once what links he would select as belonging to it—links with a fine length and needing a strong arm and a brave heart for successful play upon them, links which are broad and bold in their characteristics, never easy, and terribly difficult when Nature is in a tantrum mood. There are not so many drive and pitch holes on such courses, and when one is encountered the pitch calls for the most thoughtful golf. There are long, bare, bunkered holes that chill the blood of the nervous golfer as he goes forth from the tee with a glance at the brasseys in his bag. It seems as if he wanders into a vast space, a wilderness where the littleness of man is emphasised. As a leading example of golfing architecture of the Heroic school, I would select the fine course at Deal, and another noble specimen is Prestwick. There is a disposition in these times to make some new inland courses on such models so far as limited natural opportunities permit, and much the best of those that have been created so far is Walton Heath, where it is really Heroic golf all the way from the first tee to the home green.

A school which has yielded many fine courses is the Romantic. The lights and shades of such courses are in high contrast, and their colouring is rich. Hazards, big and full of character of their own, abound at almost every hole; there are rocks or sandhills everywhere, and likely enough the course is set in a frame of rich scenery surrounding. Some people would describe such courses as being “very sporting.” When one thinks of the Romantic school, and of the great days of adventure that one has spent when paying homage to its dead masters, one thinks of Troon and of North Berwick; and if of this type one must select one that is away from the sea, there is Sunningdale which clearly belongs to it, though its features are not so highly developed. The Braid Hills course is certainly attached to the Romantic school. The architects who were of this school, and the men who most admire their work, are warm-blooded, human players, who like risks and the overcoming of them, and who would have their pulses throb with the joy of life when they play on the links. They like, as it is said, to be called upon to take their lives in their hands at every stroke of their play. This is great golf.

As to which of all the schools provides the truest golf it is hard to say, since few men would agree on what is the truest golf. But quite likely the links of the Æsthetic school would be most frequently mentioned in this connection. There has been a subtle art at work in the planning of every hole. The architects have taken their patch of land, and, scorning all convention, have been inspired by great impulses in the selection and arrangement of the line of play. They have had moods and caprices, but they have been men of great genius, born and bred in a high atmosphere of the game. Like all other men of great independence of thought and action, they court and receive severe criticism; but at the end of it all the greatness, the superbness of the work is admitted, and its fame will for ever endure. There is character in it at every glance, but it is not such as is obtrusive, as at Troon. Here there is the perfect art that conceals art, and it is a testimony to its perfection that men go on discussing it for ever and ever, just as they still think and worry over the emotions that passed through the mind of Hamlet, and are not all agreed upon them. How many different readings, as it were, can one not give to a hole at St. Andrews—almost any hole on the old course. St. Andrews is the masterpiece of the Æsthetic school—profound, ingenious, intricate. Here and there we see a little of the influence of the Heroic school; the Romantic has had less. But always the Æsthetic school is a law unto itself, and its finished work is not to be likened to that of any other. Hoylake is of this school, though the example is not so pure and unaffected by the two great rival branches of architectural art as St. Andrews. Nevertheless it is distinctly Æsthetic, and there is no other course that is worthy of inclusion in this particular class.

We have another school, which should be called the Victorian. It has many merits, and it is very prolific. It represents a sober and industrious kind of golf, but it is utterly lacking in any inspiration. It is as business like and exact as you please, a six-o’clock-sharp morning-dress kind of golf. It conduces to good habits, and will make some good golfers. But on the whole it is rather prim and dull, and one never feels the blood running in the veins when contemplating it. Muirfield is one of the Victorian school, and there are one or two of the satellites of Hoylake, on its own seaboard, that are of it also. Sandwich has much of the Victorian element in it; but it is redeemed by the strong influence of other schools, as by the extreme romanticism of the Maiden. The suburbs in their own small way went over to Victorianism entirely at the outset, partly because their circumstances exerted such an irresistible tendency in that direction. A drive over one bunker and a pitch over the next one is Victorianism in its crudest form; but perhaps after all the suburbs are lucky in being able to attach themselves to any school. I am told that the Victorian school has had paramount influence in America.

VII

Of the links we know, those by the sea, to which do we return for the tenth or the twentieth time joyously as to a delightful friend in a charming home? Instantly we murmur the name of dear North Berwick. The old player has conviction in this immediate choice by instinct, though the question is not one which he answers lightly. In his heart he has corners for many old loves, and as he brings each one up for contemplation and counts her many charms, he thinks that surely she is the fairest of them all. But inevitably when they have all been passed in review his fancy brings him back to one, and he clings to the remembrance of her, confessing that she is not like the others. There is a subtlety in her charm, a fascination in her manners, an “altogether” which cannot be resisted. She is gentler than St. Andrews, a sweet innocent maiden wading with bare feet among the rocks of the Haddington coast, whom you love to tease and toy with; while my lady of Fifeshire is colder and of great dignity and compelling attractions. It is a fine sea at North Berwick, and though in the play one may think little enough of the sea, it is good to have the wavelets kissing the pebbles hard by an occasional green, and to hear their soothing lapping. The sound is grateful to the hard-tried nerves. There are few parts of the North Berwick course where one cannot see a little of the ocean, while here and there, such as at Point Garry and Perfection, the greens are placed in enchanting spots. Then the air is like wine. At North Berwick one is in East Lothian, in the centre of the finest golfing country in the world. In two or three weeks one may tire of the same links, the monotony of the same round, the same bunkers, the same greens. Here there are many others at hand, and all within the shortest of journeys. Chiefly there is Gullane the grand. When you are at Gullane you may think it is better than North Berwick as a place to stay and holiday in. It is quieter, quainter, more old fashioned, a trifle more like the country, and the golf is glorious. Such is the turf on old Gullane, that one feels that one should never tread upon the greens save in stockinged feet. And the man who has not captured the eighth and ninth up the hill in 4’s, and then on the summit stood hard by the Roundell to survey the finest panorama to be seen on a golf course, and taste the finest air, has something yet to know of the utmost pleasures of a golfer’s existence. Then there are Muirfield, and Archerfield, Kilspindie, and all the rest of them, so near that strong men have played on the whole collection in one day. But when you go back to North Berwick in the evening you think you will stay there still. You like the comfort of the place, and the green, and you want your Bass Rock.

It is the place to conjure up a mental picture of some great events of days gone by, as:

It is nearly sixty years ago, and there is tense excitement on the seven-hole course, as it was in those far-off days. A great foursome is being played, and there is £400 at issue. Old Tom and Allan Robertson are on one side, and the Dunns are against them on the other. They have played over two other greens and are even, and now they are to decide. The Dunns have had a great lead, but at the second last hole in the fifth and last round the game is square. Then the Dunns’ ball lodges behind a stone, and the brothers are in a frenzy, and lose their heads in several vain endeavours to extricate it. Old Tom and Allan are dormy, and the £400 goes to them at the last hole.

This picture fades away, and another framed in mournful black comes up in its place. Old Tom and his boy, the great Young Tom, are on the green, matched against old Willie Park and Mungo Park. Some news comes. It is bad news. It is taken to the green, and the others bow their heads for a moment but say nothing to the boy. But as soon as may be they take him off the links, and put him in a sailing boat to sail across the water with Old Tom, his father, to St. Andrews on the Fifeshire coast. And there he reels as he looks upon the pallid face of his much-beloved wife, her head laid upon a pillow, and the eyelids closed in death. Young Tom’s own death-warrant was signed that moment. The golfing history of North Berwick is full of the romance of the game.

VIII

In many sequestered places there are fine courses that the golfer in general knows little of. Demand of him suddenly that he shall tell you of a far-away seaside links where you may rest and play for a little while until the city calls you back, and by force of habit he will begin to murmur pleasantly about his Carnousties and his Gullanes and all the rest. They are excellent, most excellent; but we call for change, and where for the old wanderer is the change that is good enough? When he appeals to you, send him down in a cab to Paddington, bidding him take a ticket to Porthcawl, changing at Cardiff, for you may know that in the evening he will be happy, and that upon the next day the joy of life will have come again to a weary worker.

Porthcawl is a place that rests the man and gives balm to his troubled spirit. There is a fine links and the open Atlantic, and the Cymric spell is cast upon the sojourner—the feeling that one has relapsed from the severity of complicated civilisation for a little while to the peace and the simplicity of old Gwalia, the land of the real Briton. One day I was turning the pages of a small guide-book to South Wales, when I noticed that the topographer, in writing of Porthcawl, said somewhat complainingly that the coast round about there was “extremely desolate.” Beyond hinting that there were more rocks about it than were good for any well-ordered coast, he preferred not to go into details. He was describing things for the benefit of that curious person who is generally called “the tourist,” and he seemed to feel this was no place for him to linger with his charge. So in apologetic manner he gave his reader a small assortment of the usual kind of facts as an excuse for having mentioned Porthcawl at all. He told him, for example, that the novelist, R. D. Blackmore, who was a word scene-painter of breadth and effectiveness, placed the action of his “Maid of Sker” in this region of Porthcawl, and if he had had consideration for the golfer he would have added that there are landmarks of the story to be seen from all parts of the links. The tourist was further informed as to a local church, was acquainted with the curious fact that here there is a well of fresh water which rises and falls in a puzzling manner according to the going out and coming in respectively of the tide, and was supplied with some useful and indispensable knowledge about the character of the shipping with which the port had to deal. And then, as it was felt that the tourist must not tarry longer in such a place, he was hurried on to some other, where there were piers and bands, and a variety of historic remains for contemplation and study in serious moments.

Generally the requirements of the golfer are in inverse ratio to those of the tourist, and it is tolerably safe to predict that when a coast is described as “extremely desolate,” it represents a fine piece of golfing country. It is one of the good things of golf that it has come into our civilisation to use up all utterly barren and waste tracts of coastwise land, and that generally the more barren and waste the better they are for golf. Are not some of the best links there are in Britain situated on coasts that are to the non-golfing mind, uneducated to the beauty and charm of testing, full-blooded and yet scrupulously fair holes, quite naked of all attraction? And what an excellent arrangement of circumstances it is! The neighbourhood of Prestwick is sometimes by way of being “boomed” as a health resort, a place that affords a fine tonic to the lungs, and I believe the claim is well justified; but not all people would describe this spot in Ayrshire as being “interesting,” and there is certainly no kind of relation between the quality of the coast scenery and the inestimable grandeur, from the golfing point of view, of the Cardinal, the Himalayas, and above all of the glorious seventeenth, the Alps. And consider Sandwich. No tourist of discrimination has been seen, or will be, on these reclaimed wastes that have already given us one championship course, and lately a new links, which is of superlative quality. And the “extremely desolate” coast at Porthcawl which did not please our guide-book man, is found on acquaintance to be an excellent example of Nature’s impressionist seascape work, with savage rocks abounding. Even the name of Porthcawl smacks of coves and pirates, of breezes and big seas. Porthcawl sticks out so that there is nothing in the world between it and the United States of America except the Atlantic Ocean. Its golf links are on the very margin of the sea, contiguous to those black, sharp rocks—so near, indeed, that a really badly-hit ball may sometimes be sent dancing at all kinds of fantastic angles from one to another, until it comes to rest in an inaccessible place whence it will never be disturbed. Sometimes in the severer seasons, the sea, with the full, unbroken force of the Atlantic behind it, will be sent smashing along over the rocks, and even over the golf links too, until some of the bunkers are laden with salt water. Porthcawl is fine, and it is a fine change, and there are holes on the course that have a boldness and a vigour that stir the pulse of the golfing man. We play over the wall and up the hill to the turn, and there is South Wales and its ocean frame spread out at our feet, making us linger upon a glorious scene and sigh a little as we drive down the hillside to the first hole in.

IX

It is fine golf that is to be had now on Kent’s eastern seaboard, and each time one comes down into this neighbourhood with one’s bag of clubs, the more one is strengthened in the conviction as to its equal excellence with any other golfing district in the world, and the abundance of its fine prospects for the future. The magnificent character of the golf, chiefly that which is enjoyed under the authority of the Cinque Ports Club at Deal, is becoming better known and appreciated year by year, and even now the feeling is general that here is one of the finest links that were ever made for a championship to be played upon. The sister course of the Royal St. George’s Club is practically joined up to it, and now a little farther along the bay in the direction of Ramsgate is the new course of the Prince’s Club, and a very fine course too. So here we have stringed together along a small stretch of coast three of the very best courses that are to be found in the whole world of golf—one which is actually a championship course, a second which is perhaps by way of being so, and a third which may soon be mentioned in the same connection. There is enough good golfing land left in Pegwell Bay to make a fourth course, and some day not very far distant it may be made. Nature has here given to the golfer every natural advantage that it is possible to afford him in the preparation of those seaside links, the contemplation of which brings the light of pleasure into his eyes. Golf is great in our modern scheme of things, and some have said, without irreverence, that they see the shaping hand of Providence in short holes of such sporting quality as the Maiden and the Sandy Parlour, in those glorious last four holes at Deal, and in all that bumpy ground to be covered in approach play which calls for such an abundant exercise of the wits of the thoughtful golfer, and inevitably recalls to him some of the best characteristics of St. Andrews. So much, indeed, does all this place look as if it were made for golf, and intended to be a capital of golf, that a man with whom I played there once was led, while we were waiting at one of the tees, to the remark that if golf had never been invented it would surely have come to be so as soon as intelligent men had wandered hereabouts, so direct is the suggestion that is made by the nature and the contour of the land. One finds it difficult—nay, even impossible—to think of a better stretch of golfing land in the whole of England or Scotland, or anywhere where there are three links of this quality joined up to each other, so that, if so whimsically disposed, a golfer might play on from one to the other, and make a triple round of fifty-four holes.

Here, then, is a place which is eminently adapted to become a leader among golfing centres, and it would surprise no one if, at an early stage of the further evolution of golf and golfing matters, it came to be regarded as the chief of all. It is not to be overlooked that it enjoys the inestimable advantage of proximity to London. When London takes a fancy to such a thing as golf she likes to be its master, and will leave nothing undone to assert her supremacy. She has taken to golf, and Scotland already knows with what masterful zeal she is pursuing it. These seaside links of eastern Kent are to all intents and purposes London links, in that they are nearer than any other to London, and are fed almost exclusively from the capital. And a further advantage that the place possesses is in the fine bracing air with which it is enveloped, air which for its invigorating properties is hardly to be excelled anywhere in Great Britain. When the wind comes from the south-east with moderate strength, as it so often does down there, it is a fine thing for the golfer, and a stimulant not only to himself but his game.

The locality begins to feel, as one might say, like a great golfing centre. You know how St. Andrews and Carnoustie and North Berwick “feel” like that. The intelligent interest of the non-golfing people in the towns and villages round about is being awakened in the game, and they are all discovering in some way or other how they may make themselves to benefit by it. Particularly is this the case with regard to a certain good class of private hotels and boarding-houses catering specially, if not exclusively, for golfers. In all the great centres of the game one finds these places in abundance, and every player of experience knows how, in many respects, they are often to be preferred to the big hotels. Then we find a leading thoroughfare called Golf Road, houses called Golf Villas, establishments named Golf Bakeries and Golf Laundries, all of which little details are a sign that the game is coming to be regarded in the district as an “industry,” and the district is wise in arriving at such an understanding in good time. Moreover, one would be inclined to say that the standard of play down here is at least as high, taking it all round, as it is at any other big golfing centre. There are foozlers on every links, but more men with very short handicaps, men who have really come to grips with the game, are playing round Pegwell Bay than in most parts, chiefly because, whether member or visitor, the expense of playing is considerable, and the play itself is difficult, and the long-handicap men have discovered that there is not much fun in paying high rates for the privilege of spending week-ends in bunker practice. And yet another attribute of the large and important golfing centre does this neighbourhood possess, in the good quality of the caddies which in the course of many seasons it has at last developed. A man once said that if he saw the caddies beforehand he could tell what kind of golf was played in a place, and though this may have been going too far, there was a germ of truth in the idea. Mediocre links and mediocre players never produce good caddies, and the reverse argument generally holds good; and everybody knows that a good race of caddies is not to be produced in a couple of seasons. Oftentimes it needs at least a generation. But the caddies at Deal and Sandwich nowadays are excellent, and this is not such an unimportant matter as some people might imagine it to be.