of the afternoon; and at the end of the day the unfortunate golfer, moved almost to despair by his failures, soon recovers again that optimism which is his constant succour, and then his hopes are of the morrow. Does he not know now what it was that he was “doing wrong,” the golfing sin that he committed all the day? To-morrow the fault shall be corrected, and the swings that are made in after-hours now give fair promise of a great change. A well-prepared heart has the golfer, the like of which, as Horace says, hopes in the worst fortune, and in prosperity fears a change in the chances. Give it that the man has golfed above his true ability, and how he does fear that the next game may put him back again; but here again there is buoyant hope in evidence, and when the evening is filled with the exaltation of it, how sweet it is to wander a little over the resting, deserted links and mark the places where balls were pitched, and the lines along which fine putts were made, and the points to which play shall be directed when the next round is in the making, perhaps the best of all.

So it is hope and hope all the way through the golfer’s life, and it is the most joyous, the most uplifting of all the instincts, and the most intensely human, and that which is given to man alone. It is because golf strikes always this chord in his nature that it makes the strong appeal to him. There is no other game or sport that permits him to hope through failure in the same way, that leads him on, coaxes him, cajoles him, even fools him. And this drama of the emotions of the individual is played always in the most perfect setting for such a simple human play—the sea and green fields and plain earth, and the simplest tools to move a little white ball, not along marked lines or within narrow limits or in protected arenas, but anywhere along that green grass, over the hills and through the valleys and across the streams and rushing rivers, while the wind blows now this way and then that, and the rain pours. All the time the golfer pursues the little ball, alone with plain nature and his human adversary. Here he is released from all the conventionalities of mind that hold him in his other doings in this complicated civilisation. The primitive instincts are in command; they have the fields and the sea for harmony in the scene, and the golfer is away from all the intricacies of the twentieth century, and is the simple man and the hopeful man.

That is a fair creed concerning the command of golf, and we may reject the theory that indomitable, persevering mankind finds the fascination of the game merely in the failures and irritations that it brings and in the desire to overcome them. The activity of that instinct of hope is the mystic charm, and surely it is to the credit of a game that it should teach the man to look forward with courage and cheerfulness, and to be always something of an optimist, and the more of it the better for his game. These things lead to the making of a good man as well as a good golfer.

II

Men of other races, whose skins are not white, are afoot with this game. Black men are playing; yellow men are becoming expert; red men have achieved great skill. A few years since a golfer traveller found his way to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, and he saw the wild Red Indian at golf, and thought that it suited him better than his old game of lacrosse. Spotted Horse drove off along the prairie—a plain prairie with only a few shrubs about—and he followed and played the ball for a couple of miles to the turn, and then played it back. There were no holes; the game was to play the course in the fewest strokes. Here, indeed, is the primitive golf. Some of the Indians are said to have made fine drives—as good as the best that white men do—and this was all the more remarkable inasmuch as it is the Red Indians’ pretty custom to yell and howl in a frightful chorus while one of their number is addressing the ball preparatory to making his stroke. So it does not seem easy to put the red men off.

Golf, indeed, is the one world game; it is in essence that very simple sport which so easily and certainly spreads over the planet. Everywhere the British are pioneers, and they are by far the more numerous players; but native proselytes are coming in fast in almost every quarter of the globe, so now it may fairly be said that no other game is being played everywhere by so many different sorts of people as this game of ours. Sit on a magic carpet and be transported to any place, and there, somewhere about you, will be a golf course.

I have lately had some talk with men from the East, who tell of the good game that half-naked tribesmen, standing and walking in bare feet, have learned to play; and, moreover, of the beautiful clubs, most exquisitely finished and sometimes inlaid with ivory and fancy woods, that they have made. I am assured that the “professional champion of Ceylon” is a Cingalese caddie who holds the record for the Ridgeway course, made when he was playing against a British golfer of thoroughly good class. The Japanese are beginning to play, and good judges have been led to express fears that their qualities and temperaments will bring them to a higher state of perfection in the short game than has ever been attained before, and which will surely threaten the supremacy of the white man. Golfing at Kobe is a peculiar experience. The course is at Rokkosan, on the top of a high mountain, and you must therefore climb the mountain before you can golf on the course. You go by rickshaw to the foot of the Cascade Valley, and are then carried up the mountain slope by coolies for an hour and a half, when the tees and the bunkers come into view. Those who play there hold that the view from this course is the finest from any, though it can hardly be better than that from the course on the top of Senchal Hill at Darjeeling, for from here there is Kingenjunga, 28,000 feet high, to be seen, and from the summit of Tiger Hill, overlooking the course, there is Mount Everest itself in view.

And there is golf in China too, six clubs for it. We had no sooner come to the conclusion and officially announced some years ago that Wei-hai-wei was a very desirable resort, than the golf club was duly established there. In these days the building prospector first settles upon his golf course, and advertises it, and then he builds his houses round about; and in the same way it is realised that it is the proper thing when seeking to make a new centre of Europeans abroad to start with a golf course. I have been with men on shipboard who, having golfed on the queer course of Tangier, have then speculated unceasingly in the smoke-room as we sailed along the smooth waters of the West African coast about the kind of golf that would be vouchsafed to them on reaching the Canary Islands. Some time since I had a letter from a highly-placed British official at Chinkiang on the Yangtse River, and he told me how they had just begun to play the game out there on a new course which was covered with crater-like excrescences. These are Chinese graves, and they are said to make most excellent hazards. There are pig-tailed fellows for caddies, and it was carefully ascertained that no Chinese sentiment is injured in the matter.

There are golf clubs in all the States of Europe. There are very many in France, and there are more each year, and it is remarkable that the Frenchman is now establishing them for his exclusive use. At Boulogne the Englishman and his friends of France golf together on a course where some of the hazards were the earthworks of Napoleon’s camp—the camp that held the Grand Army that lay in readiness for the invasion of Britain. What irony is here—that the British golfer should play over the Emperor’s camp! The Master-General must himself