Here was a menace. It was felt that America was making very good in golf. And there came vaguely into the minds of British golfers the idea that a demonstration of their strength should be made in this new country, for satisfaction and for the sake of national pride. Yet, with their conservatism, our British golfing people are slow to move in matters of this kind. They are content with the game, and perhaps wisely so. But there was the feeling that something should be done. With initiative demanded, Lord Northcliffe, who had become a keen lover of the game, made a characteristic movement unobtrusively, as the result of which Harry Vardon and Edward Ray were sent across the Atlantic to test the strength of American golfers in their own Open Championship. Vardon was then five times Open Champion of the world; Ray was the holder of the title. Two other Europeans sailed the seas with the same object in their minds, one of them being Wilfrid Reid, the clever little professional attached to the Banstead Downs club near London, a man who had gained international honours constantly and has much fine golf in him, and the other Louis Tellier, the professional of the Societe de Golf de Paris at La Boulie, Versailles. Four good men; two great champions; one the greatest golfer the world has known. They seemed to be enough. Their design was to win the American championship.

Those who were not at Brookline during the week that followed, and only received a result that was amazing and inexplicable, were ready enough, perhaps not unnaturally, to suggest that this course of the Country Club could not have afforded a proper test, that it was so far different from a good British course, so mysteriously American, that the native players must have been favoured by it, and the superior skill that the British golfers possessed had no opportunity for an outlet. As I say, this was not an unreasonable supposition in the light of the amazing events that occurred; but it was entirely wrong. There are few courses in America that are better than this one, and to this judgment I would add that though there are inland courses in England that are superior there are not many. Judged upon the best standard of inland courses in Britain I would call it thoroughly good.

It has seven holes of over four hundred yards each, one of them being five hundred and twenty, and, the total length of the round being 6245 yards, it was good enough in this respect. It has three short holes, well separated, and some of its drive-and-iron-holes are quite excellent. The Brookline course differs from many others in America in the quick and varied undulations of its land - heaving, rolling, twisting everywhere - and thus calling for adaptability of stance, and careful reckoning of running after pitching at every shot. By this feature the play is made as interesting as it should be, but often is not. Only two of the holes on the course are quite flat and plain, and these are novelties. They are the first and eighteenth, which take straight lines parallel to each other through the great polo field alongside the club-house. Polo is a considerable feature of the scheme of the Country Club, and its comparatively small territory is not to be interfered with for the sake of the golfers who have so much more of Massachusetts for their delectation. Yet it is necessary to play through this polo field. Consequently we start the round at one end of it and play a hole of 430 yards right along past the grand stand. Then away we go out into the country, over the hills and along the dales, and through the trees and cuttings where rocks were blasted, and, after many adventures, return to the smooth plain land of the polo field as to the straight run home at the end of a steeplechase, and play along positively the plainest 410-yard hole I have ever seen. The tee is at one end of the polo field, with the grand stand in the middle distance on the left. There is not a bunker along that field, but there is rough grass on the left of the part designated for the fairway, and there is the same with a horse-racing track as well on the right. At the far end of the field, near to the club-house, the race-track, of course, bends round and comes across the line of play. Just on the other side of that track the ground rises up steeply for three or four yards, and then up there sloping upwards and backwards is the putting green. Thus the race-track becomes a hazard to guard the green, and the green is on a high plateau with big trees all round it. The hole is there all complete, with hardly a thing done to it by man, and it is one of the most remarkable examples I have seen of a piece of ready-made golf of the plainest possible description, resulting in something fairly good. It is 410 yards long, and if the tee shot is a little defective the attempt to reach the green with the second is going to be a heartbreaking business. With a good drive that second shot, played with a cleek perhaps, or the brassey may be needed, has to be uncommonly well judged and true. The margin for error is next to nothing. At the first glance at it I thought that this eighteenth hole was very stupid, but it is a hole that grows a little upon you, and the original impression has been withdrawn from my mind. It was the last hope of Vardon and Ray, and it failed them. The fairway at Brookline is far better than on the average American course, and if one says that its putting greens are among the very best in America, the greatest possible compliment is paid to them.

There have been many touches of romance in the history of golf at the Country Club, but none more remarkable than that associated with the construction of the comparatively new ninth, tenth, and eleventh holes, two long ones with a short one between them, which are among the nicest holes in all America. For some years after the beginning of this century, when golf at Brookline had become a very big thing, these holes did not exist, their predecessors being embraced in the other parts of the course. But, for the crossing that they involved, those predecessors had become dangerous, and it was determined to take in a new tract of land, and to make three new holes upon it. It was a tremendous undertaking, for "land " was only a kind of courtesy title for the wild mixture of forest, rock, and swamp into which a man might sink up to his neck, but for which about 25,000 dollars had to be paid, while another thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars had to be spent in making it fit for golf and preparing the holes, so that these three cost an average of about thirteen thousand dollars a hole, or roughly£ 2500 as we may say if we are English. At the ninth as much rock had to be blasted as some one afterwards used to make a wall two hundred yards long, and the best part of a yard in thickness. The tenth hole is a very delightful short one, with the green in a glade far below the tee. They call it "The Redan," because Mr. G. Herbert Windeler (long resident in America, but English in nationality still, despite his past presidency of the U.S.G.A.), who is largely responsible for the golf at Brookline, and designed and superintended the construction of these holes, had the famous piece of golf at North Berwick in his mind when he planned this one, but before the end he departed far from the original conception, and all for the good of the hole. When it was being made the place for the green needed raising from the swamp, and nearly two thousand loads of broken rocks were deposited there; and after soil to a depth of eighteen inches had been laid upon the stone foundation a splendid putting green was made. With all its variety, this is not a course of such intricacy and such mystery as St. Andrews is, to need long weeks of study and practice to understand every shot upon it. You may play St. Andrews from childhood to old age and yet be puzzled and mistaken sometimes, but Brookline is more candid than that, and it is to its credit that with all its variety you may be completely acquainted with it in a very few days. Let me say then that the suggestion that Mr. Ouimet had a distinct advantage in a knowledge of the course obtained in his childhood, and maintained thenceforth by frequent practice on the course near to which he lived, is quite nonsense. He had no advantage whatever. Vardon and Ray had practised there for several days in advance, and if they did not know all about it that there was to know it was their own fault. They did know, and local knowledge, which counts for far less with great golfers than men a little their inferiors, had nothing to do with the issue.