them in the piece, another was Afghanistan, a third was Persia, and, scattering the attention over the islands of the earth, one reflected that no golf in Iceland had been heard of. But shortly afterwards this brief list of lone golfless places was reduced to one. To a little gathering of friends one night an adventurous gentleman was describing the excitements of a day's rough golf that he had had one time when near to Reykiavik, and, if the course was to some extent made for the occasion, little enough did that matter then. There were some real holes, and the pioneer declared one of them to be the longest and most sporting he had ever played; and we knew he had played some good ones. So Iceland came into the fold. It was discovered during the recent wars that there was golf here and there in those worrying Balkans. Then lo! the land of the Afghans was also delivered to the game, and it was the Ameer himself who was chiefly responsible, thus emulating the rulers of many other lands. He had heard of golf, had seen it, realised it, and had been fascinated. Thereupon he had a short course prepared for him in the neighbourhood of Kabul, and began to practise with royal assiduity at his driving, pitching, and putting. Humble, doubtful, and yet loyal subjects observed this done from a respectful distance, and they wondered. After a little while they perceived that it was a game, and that the chief of Afghans invariably sought with his little ball the holes that were placed upon the course. Being practical people, they conceived that they might turn the game and their royal master's fondness for it to their advantage, and thereupon began to deposit in the holes at night such petitions as they had difficulty in getting placed before the royal eyes by any other means. They believed that by their new system the Ameer was sure to see and read what was intended for him. Yet it proved that he was somewhat angered by this manner of approach, and gave orders that all petitions found in his golfing holes should be burned unread. The petitioning parties had not understood how seriously the game he played was taken, nor the deep effect it had upon the mind and the disposition of the player, else they would surely have moved craftily and warily with their prayers, and then they might have gained imperial favour. Had they seen their ruler miss his drive, foozle his second, put his third into the pond, slice among the trees with his fifth—even Ameers being penalised a stroke for lifting from the water—and eventually reach the putting green in nine, three more strokes then being needed, they would have been stupid Afghans had they not at a convenient moment taken their petitions from the holes, or withheld them if they had not placed them there. But when an Ameer hits a good one from the tee, when his ball flies fast and straight from his royal brassey (and rulers also laugh when a topped ball runs a bunker!), when by enormous luck he lays an approach quite close to the hole, and afterwards the putt is truly played—why, many an Afghan might pray for the release of a brother from prison in Kabul, and the brother, pardoned, might be raised to office in the palace, perhaps to be an executioner. Now, if the petition had been submitted when the sovereign had done his hole in twelve, the brother might have died as arranged, perhaps the petitioner also, and who knows but that the neglectful greenkeeper, for not having seen that all holes for the day were free of pleas, would not have joined the departures for another world. Wandering players may look forward now to some future golf in Afghanistan. Have we not heard of the Shah at the game? If it cannot be proved, Persia must be left in an Asiatic golfless solitude, with the gibe against her that even celestial China has her courses, and that they are everywhere save in the Persia where Omar was, and in fine worldly philosophy bade us take good pleasures while we may.

Golf's vast ubiquity is illustrated in another case recalled by this reference to kings who play. Miss Decima Moore of the theatres has a love for roving far which has led her to many raw places of the earth for hunting and shooting and adventurous exploration when she has tired of the footlights and has longed for Nature with no mask at all. Then, being golfer too, she has wandered with her bag of clubs into many distant lands, and one morning in London, just back from Central Africa, she told me of some strange experiences of a golfing woman. She has played the game up in Uganda, and explained the quality of the play of King Daudi Chwa, who is a ruler of those parts. Even once before, a colonial bishop had informed me of the golf of this dusky king. He had had some holes laid out for himself, so I was instructed, and when not engaged in duties of his kingly office, which were seemingly not onerous, he devoted himself earnestly to the reduction of his handicap and to lowering his record for his private course—upon which strangers in those parts are always welcome to a game. The bishop said that his Majesty drove an excellent ball, played his irons well, and putted with a good instinct for line and length, and the actress backed the bishop's story. In the region of the Victoria Nyanza there are no Sunningdales to be found, but the royal course of nine holes is considered a creditable thing. The king, who was lately in England and played a little here, will be glad to see any golfers who may go that way, and it may be his pleasure to call one of his holes by a name of theirs as, with a good African grace, he called one "Decima" when our English lady played it.

§

These wandering golfers do bring home great stories, and others send them. A friend, poor Tom Browne, who is dead, the clever artist in black and white, sat with me once at lunch in the Adelphi, and we talked of golf in distant lands and many things concerning it, for in the morning he was going eastwards to China and Japan. He said he should play as much as possible, and he did. While at the table he drew a sketch on a piece of paper and passed it to me with a smile. It was a picture of himself leaving on a golfing holiday to those very foreign parts, with numerous bags of clubs, cases of spare clubs guaranteed for all climates, and innumerable large boxes piled up all round him, each one labelled "One gross of best balls." Poor Tom always did take his clubs with him to foreign lands, and on this occasion he made good, as one might say, on that little sketch he drew at lunch by the places he played at afterwards, and queer drawings he sent to me of the courses and the people at them. He wrote from Tien-Tsin that the one they had there was just outside the town and was a flat plain covered with Chinese graves, the course being really nothing but one huge graveyard. "The Chinamen," he said in his letter, "plant their graves anywhere that suits them, and they consist of raised-up mounds which enclose the coffins. Off the graves the ball will bounce at all kinds of angles. Sometimes after heavy rains the mounds fall to pieces and expose the coffins. The golf club can remove any of these graves by buying them at four taels a coffin, and when a grave is bought in this way the native takes the coffin away, buries it somewhere else, and the grave is then flattened down. Fore-caddies are employed on this course. The 'greens' consist of baked mud, as is usual in these eastern parts, and are generally circular in shape. Chinese caddies do not understand the game and think that the foreign devils who play it are surely mad. They continually ask the players, 'When will you finish hitting and following that ball about?' And they have a local rule at Tien-Tsin that 'a ball lying in an open grave may be picked out and dropped without penalty.'"

This graveyard golf, as I know, is not at all peculiar to Tien-Tsin,