A whole book having been written on Australian golf we may leave it unconsidered here. Hardly an island but there is a links upon it. The other day, when I had myself but just come back from foreign golfing parts, I was mated for the game on a London course to one who told me he had only then returned from Fiji, where his last game was at Suva and was a foursome in which the local bishop, the attorney-general, the chief trader, and himself were engaged. He explained the part that was played by mimosa pudica, being the "sensitive plant," in the golf of the Fiji islanders. When this herb is touched by anything, its leaves droop and close upon the object, and, mimosa pudica being all over the fairway of the course, balls would be too often hidden and lost but for the agile caddies who are sent in front to watch for them. In these days one is hearing frequently of travellers' tales like this.

Spain having been captured by the game, as I shall relate in time, there is little need to dwell upon the other conquests of golf in Europe. In Germany it is fast advancing, and the German Golf Association, which publishes a German Golf Year-Book, is an enterprising body. The Kaiser has encouraged the game, and has given land for it. At Baden Baden they have given the most valuable prizes to professionals; at Oberhof, in the Thuringen Forest, there has been made under the guidance of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg one of the nicest courses a German need wish to play upon, and the girl caddies in pretty uniform are the most picturesque alive. In Norway and Sweden, in Denmark, and nearly everywhere there is golf, and much of it. It flourishes in Italy, as is to be shown in a later chapter. Even in Russia you may golf. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow have their clubs and courses, and the Mourino Club, belonging to the former, has its place near a small village some dozen miles from the capital. The golf is good for Russia, but one does not quickly forget the roughness of the road in reaching it. And down at the bottom of that side of the map there is golf at Constantinople too! The game is done on the yok maidan just outside the city, yok being Persian for "arrow," and maidan the word for "plain," the fact being that it was on this land that the sultans and their suites in days gone by were accustomed to practise archery, and there are still on the plain many stone pillars erected to the memory of great shots that were made. The English-speaking colony had some difficulty to gain permission to golf on this ground, and, having no exclusive rights in the matter, are harassed by many worries. It is used largely for drilling soldiers, and is described as being "a favourite resort for Jews on Saturdays, for Greeks on Sundays, and for Turks on Fridays." The golfer may need to delay his stroke while a long string of camels passes through the fairway, and again he may have difficulty in persuading a party of Turkish ladies, closely veiled, taking the sun on one of the putting greens, to retire therefrom for a little while. Yet the game is much enjoyed by the officials of foreign Governments in Constantinople, and the turf on the yok maidan is good.

In the rich remembrances of the game there is little that is mournful; but one sad moment comes when I read a letter reminding me that golf was once played "farthest south," where man does not abide save briefly for exploration and adventure, where there is eternal ice and snow. Captain Robert Scott, the glorious British hero of the Southern Pole, whose friendship I enjoyed, was a golfer too. One of many letters of a personal kind I had from him, just before he set out on his last magnificent but fatal expedition, was addressed from the Littlestone Golf Club. He asked me to send to the ship a certain piece of golfing literature, believing that "members of the expedition would read it with interest and, I hope, with benefit to their handicaps!" He had taken some clubs and balls up there into the Antarctic on his previous expedition, when farthest south was reached. On one of the last days he spent in London I had some talk with him on different matters, and we joked about ways of playing Antarctic shots. We were in his office in Victoria Street then. "Good-bye!" he said in parting, "And you must come to meet me on my return!" And if none met him coming back, yet we know the game he played.

The fact that there is golf nearly everywhere on earth will make it appear to some minds, reasonably too, that here is a convenient diversion for those travellers who like this sort of thing, something with which they can fill up time when held up for a while in a distant country and being impatient or weary. True, golf is good for that; but the unsophisticated who imagine that this is the full relation between travel and the game, and that this is the function of the courses everywhere, suffer from a poor delusion, which is expensive.

It is a modern necessity to the traveller. In these days we are a people of wanderers; railways offer cheap journeys, steamships carry us over seas at little cost, hotels are good and comfortable; and why should those who like and have the hours not be always roaming and seeing the open world? But travelling sometimes has its inconveniences and its tedious days. Some wanderers unconsciously exert themselves towards loneliness, and they do not love it when they have it. The joy of meeting with a friend when one is half a globe away from home! With all the travelling that is done in these days there has come a great increase of loneliness. Golf has been set to destroy it. There are still people who travel and do not golf, but they are fewer daily, and as each new travel-golfer is established he wonders how he lived and moved and was moderately well contented and satisfied before. His travelling was a plain occupation then; now it makes more emotion and thrill, and, positively, it is more educative. There was a time, when I was very young, when I did not golf as I travelled abroad, partly because there were few courses to play upon and no golfers to play with, for it is only in recent times that the game has been established in every country in the world; and as I look back upon those days it is hard to realise that they were in this present life. They should have belonged to some other existence, which in the course of time and nature was given up, a reincarnation having followed ages after.