out of season.  Few persons, perhaps, will call golf the very first and queen of games.  Cricket exercises more faculties of body, and even of mind, for does not the artful bowler “bowl with his head?” Football demands an extraordinary personal courage, and implies the 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 ball is knocked along the roads to a fixed goal.  But this is naturally very poor fun compared to the genuine game as played on the short turf beside the grey northern sea on the coast of Fife.  Golf has been introduced of late years into England, and is played at Westward Ho, at Wimbledon, at Blackheath (the oldest club), at Liverpool, over Cowley Marsh, near Oxford, and in many other places.  It is, therefore, no longer necessary to say that golf is not a highly developed and scientific sort of hockey, or bandy-ball.  Still, there be some to whom the processes of the sport are a mystery, and who would be at a loss to discriminate a niblick from a bunker-iron.  The thoroughly equipped golf-player needs an immense