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 variety of weapons, or implements, which are
carried for him by his caddie--a youth or old man, who is, as it were,
his esquire, who sympathizes with him in defeat, rejoices in his success,
and aids him with such advice as his superior knowledge of the ground
suggests. The class of human beings known as caddies are the offspring
of golf, and have peculiar traits which distinguish them from the
professional cricketer, the waterman, the keeper, the gillie, and all
other professionals. It is not very easy to account for their little
peculiarities. One thing is certain--that when golf was introduced by
Scotchmen into France, and found a home at Pau, in the shadow of the
Pyrenees, the French caddie sprang, so to speak, from the