ancient, the early Scottish, and the late gutty periods. Of the primeval there is no more to be said than there is of primeval man. We know the latter was born, that he did work of sorts, that he ate and slept, that in his way he lived and perhaps he loved, while certainly he died. Of the primeval golfers we are solid in the belief that they had clubs and balls, for they must have had, and they had holes or marks, for they could not have done without them. We suspect them of stymies, for only the weight of tradition has held the stymie to us still, and for its power this tradition must be far extended. Almost certainly they made their first clubs from the branches of trees, but there was nothing grand in that, for Harry Vardon and brother Tom, Edward Ray as well, all three beginning their golf in their native Jersey, did the same, and they played with stone marbles for their balls, played in the moonlight too. There would seem here to have been a tendency towards a throw-back in Jersey golf; but Vardon and his associates have made an ample advance since then. Good Sir Walter Simpson, in his deep researches, leaned to a more exact and defined theory or tradition of the primeval golf, and he gaily marked for it a beginning and a place. It is attractive and it is reasonable, and this, with the theory of the spontaneous and inevitable origin of the game in many places in the early times of man, theories with living detail thickening on them, come near in quality to real tradition. Sir Walter, you may remember, supposed a shepherd minding his sheep, who often chanced upon a round pebble and, having his crook in his hand, he would strike it away. In the ordinary way this led to nothing, but once on a time, "probably," a shepherd feeding his sheep on the links, "which might have been those of St. Andrews," rolled one of these stones into a rabbit scrape, and then he exclaimed, "Marry! I could not do that if I tried!"—a thought, so instinctive is ambition, as Sir Walter says, which nerved him to the attempt. Enter the second shepherd, who watches awhile and says then: "Forsooth, but that is easy!" He takes a crook in his hand, swings violently, and misses. The first shepherd turns away laughing. The two fellows then perceive that this is a serious business, and together they enter the gorse and search for round stones wherewith to play their new game. Sir Walter Simpson was a terrible man, and he must needs work into this excellent romance the declaration that each shepherd, to his surprise, found an old golf ball, every reader knowing that they "are to be found there in considerable quantity even to this day." Then these shepherd-golfers deepened the rabbit scrape so that the balls might not jump out of it, and they set themselves to practising putting. The stronger shepherd happened to be the less skilful, and he found himself getting beaten at this diversion, whereupon he protested that it was a fairer test of skill to play for the hole from a considerable distance. When this was settled it was found that the game was improved. The players, says the theorist, at first called it "putty," because the immediate object was to putt or put the ball into the hole or scrape, but at the longer distance the driving was the chief interest, and therefore the name was changed to "go off" or "golf." In the meantime the sheep, as sheep will do, had strayed, and the shepherds had to go in chase of them. Naturally they found this a very troublesome and annoying interruption, and so they hit upon the great idea of making a circular course of holes which enabled them to play and herd at the same time. By this arrangement there were many holes and they were far apart, and it became necessary to mark their whereabouts, which was easily done by means of a tag of wool from a sheep, fastened to a stick, which, as is remarked, is a sort of flag still used on many Scottish courses in much the same simplicity as by those early shepherds. And Sir Walter wrote with reason that since those early days the essentials of the game have altered but little.

After the time of these first shepherds there were doubtless more shepherds, and the bucolics in general would be given to the game. Yet it should never be understood that even in its origins this game was one that was practised chiefly by persons of low intellectual strength. Indeed it was not. In the ancient classics there are references to ball games that bear close resemblance to primitive golf, and then when games began to appear in Holland and France that had golf in them, even though they were not golf, it was not the common people always who were most attracted. And in passing, it must be said, that while golf as we have it now is British—Scottish, if you like—and there is enough authority and substance in the claim for the satisfaction of any pride seeing that the laws of St. Andrews have been for ages back the laws of the world at large, it is too much to believe that a game so simple in its essentials, so obvious and so necessary and so desirable, should have had an exclusive origin in any one country, to be copied by the others. The elements of golf must have come up spontaneously in many different parts of the world, although they were without rule, organisation, and might not have been known as a game or anything like that by those who employed them. But it was there, as eating and kissing were; and it fell to the lot of those canny and most discerning Scots to regularise it, as it were, to declare it a game and give it definiteness, and in due time to set up laws and a government, all of which were just what they should be and the best conceivable. It might not have been such a good game as it is now had it not been nurtured at St. Andrews, Leith, and Musselburgh, and in those other early cradles of the pastime; but I cannot believe that if there had been no land north of Newcastle there would have been no golf, and we should be moaning now in vague discontent for a mysterious something lost to life.

§

I may adduce some circumstances from most ancient history and tradition which have not been applied to this question hitherto, but should have been, for they seem to be apposite and remarkable. In these days Ireland, with a fine spirit, is struggling for better golfing recognition, and should have it. When a game is for the world, what is the Irish Channel? The country has some very splendid links, and has produced some players—if few of them—of the finest quality; but a people who exhibit frequently a fine appreciation of the spirit of the golfing brotherhood, and to the wandering player extend a hospitality of which it can only be said that it is Irish, are treated coldly in championship dignity being withheld from their courses and their not being admitted to the higher councils of the game. I remember with gratitude a very early acquaintance with the golf of Newcastle in County Down, that glorious course in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains, and with Portrush in the north, while about Dublin there are links that fear no comparison with the best of other lands. The ordinary records may indicate that there was no golf in Ireland until 1881, when what is now the Royal Belfast Club was formed; but listen to a story which is brought to me in some spirit of triumph by a friend, Mr. Victor Collins, a golfer, who practises his game, for the most part, not on any mainland but out on the Arran Isles, west of the Irish coast, out on little Inneshmor, where he lives when he is not in London, and where he has a small course of just a few sporting holes for his own delight, one which would have been as agreeable to the golfers of the prehistoric period as it is now to a modern gentleman who occasionally becomes a little tired of over-civilisation and likes to retreat to simplicity and Nature. It is a considerable change from