existence of a fierce delight in battle with one's peers. Tennis, with
all its merits, is a game for the few, so rare are tennis-courts and so
expensive the pastime. But cricketers, football-players, tennis-players,
would all give golf the second place after their favourite exercise; and
just as Themistocles was held to be the best Greek general, because each
of his fellows placed him second, so golf may assert a right to be
thought the first of games. One great advantage it certainly has--it is
a game for "men" of all ages, from eight, or even younger, to eighty. The
links of St. Andrews are probably cleared just now of the little lads and
the veterans, they make room for the heroes, the medalists, the great
players--Mr. Mackay, Mr. Lamb, Mr. Leslie Balfour, and the rest. But at
ordinary times there are always dozens of tiny boys in knickerbockers and
scarlet stockings, who "drive out" the first hole in some twenty strokes
of their little clubs, and who pass much of their time in fishing for
their lost balls in the muddy burn. As for the veterans "on the
threshold of old age," it is pleasant to watch their boyish eagerness,
the swaying of their bodies as they watch the short flight of their
longest hits; their delight when they do manage to hit further than the
sand-pit, or "bunker," which is named after the nose of a long-dead
principal of the university; their caution, nay, their almost tedious
delay in the process of putting, that is, of hitting the ball over the
"green" into the neighbouring hole. They can still do their round, or
their two rounds, five or ten miles' walking a day, and who can speak
otherwise than well of a game which is not too strenuous for healthy age
or tender childhood, and yet allows an athlete of twenty-three to put out
all his strength?

Golf is a thoroughly national game; it is as Scotch as haggis, cockie-
leekie, high cheekbones, or rowanberry jam. A spurious imitation, or an
arrested development of the sport, exists in the south of France, where a