for not long ago I had a letter from a British official at Chiankiang on the Yangtse River, in which he told me that they had just begun to play the game out there on a course covered with crater-like excrescences, these Chinese graves again, and he declared that they made the most excellent hazards. It should be added for their credit's sake, golfers being considerate people and mindful of others' feelings, that they carefully ascertained in this case that no Chinese sentiment was injured by play in these cemeteries, if they are to be called by such a name. Again, I recall that a little while since the golfers who have a course in the Malay peninsula went down to it one morning and found a Chinaman digging up the remains of a deceased relative from one of the putting greens, intending to remove them to China; because it is a common thing, as I am told, when a Chinaman dies abroad, for his people to inter him temporarily if they can and give him another burial in his native land when opportunity chances. There has been a great move in things in this country lately. The Government has changed; the people, according to some trade returns that I have seen, are taking extensively to smoking English cigarettes and wearing unlovely English clothes. So it is inevitable that in their vast multitudes they will one day come into golf, for a little advancement towards modern ways often leads to strikes and golf. One fears to think that when China has a championship her people may compete in such a costume as is favoured by some of the oldest and best Scottish professionals (and if asked for a name we shall mention good Sandy Herd as a captain of the class), who always wear dark trousers and a light-grey jacket to their golf. There must be some virtue in this unconventional arrangement of tints; for so many of the great are attached to it.

In other parts of Asia there is golf that is peculiar, especially in India where it flourishes to the extent of forty or fifty clubs, including those of Calcutta and Bombay, which are not merely the oldest in India but rank high in seniority among the golf clubs of the world. Both were well established before 1860, at which time there were only two or three in England, and the game was all but unknown in America. Despite the fact that it was born in 1842 and was really an Indian offshoot of the famous Royal Blackheath Club, the Royal Bombay remains a little primitive in the matter of its course. It is a golf course for one part of the day and something else for the remainder, and it is perhaps the only course in the world which is dismantled daily. The fact is that it is situated on what is called the "maidan," an open space near to the European business quarter, and the golfers, having no exclusive possession of it, are not allowed to play after half past ten in the morning and are required, when they have done, to remove their hazards. This obviously necessitates unconventional obstacles, and the club has had to resort to movable screens, varying from four to ten feet high, which are put up when play begins and taken away again when it is finished. Having become accustomed to this sort of thing it ceases to annoy, and in Bombay the course is considered good and sporting, and the greens are well attended. Then up on the hills at Darjeeling there is the highest golf course in the world, for it is situated at an elevation of more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea on the abandoned cantonment of Seneshal. Scenery often does not count for very much with golfers, and the better the golfer the keener he is on the game and the less does he care at times about the surroundings of the course. Yet, as I am told, it would be a dull poor soul that was not moved by the views from the Darjeeling course, with Mounts Everest and Kinchinjunga, both nearly thirty thousand feet high, in one direction and the plains of Bengal in another. But perhaps the most curious of the Indian courses is that of the Royal Western India Club, upon which is an idgah, or kind of temple, some thirty feet in height and fifty long, with bastions at either end and minarets in the middle. This idgah serves the double duty of club-house and a hazard also, for it has to be driven over from the tee on the way to the eleventh hole, and many are the marks on its walls that were made by balls that were hit too low. The course has another peculiarity in that it possesses seventeen holes only, no amount of ingenuity being enough to scheme out an eighteenth on the land available, so one of them has to be played twice over to make up the usual eighteen. This club has its course at Nasik, and mention of the idgah reminds one that the Royal Bangkok Club of Siam used to have an old and very imposing Siamese temple for a club-house. A little while since, when travelling northwards from Marseilles through France, I met, in the restaurant car of my P.L.M. train, an officer just going home on leave from India, and he assured me that he had found no place in the country where there was no golf, and he gave me some good examples of the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the golfers there. Thus at Multam, for the betterment of their sanded putting "browns" they keep them oiled all over, so that the ball runs evenly along them, and at a reasonable pace. There is an attendant to each green, who smooths over the track that is made by every ball when putted. And my companion told me also that in the season at Gulmurg in Kashmir, where they have two courses, there is such a crowd of golfers that it is difficult to arrange starting times for all of them.