It was determined that with such a beginning everything should be done most thoroughly afterwards. Thousands of trees had to be cut down, the ground cleared, ploughed, and raked, and the putting greens sown. On hardly any course in any country has the work of construction been done more thoroughly. Then Mr. Harry Colt was brought from England to design the holes, and he gave of some of his most cunning, most artistic work, having a fine field for his quick imagination. The result is eighteen holes as good and rich as Spanish holes need be. Some of the short ones are as good short holes as I have seen. One with the green on a hog's back, the seventh, is a most appetising thing. At the third there is a quick slope on the left of the green and the approach is one of those twisty things that are a strong feature of the Coltian style of architecture, demanding a skill and calculation from the player that many bunkers would not exact. There is a dog-leg hole for the fifth that leads to a green partly framed in a corner of trees.

Parts of Spain are treeless, the great plain above which Madrid is placed, the long lone sweep of land that you look down upon from the palace, down to the Manzanares and beyond to a far horizon, is one of the most desolate countries that my eyes have seen. But here at El Pardo there are trees enough. Chestnuts and cork are everywhere, and the course has a look of our sweet Sunningdale at home. Harrows, rakes, and spades have done their work most wondrous well, and the nicest gradients have been given to the putting greens. But there is something even more remarkable still that has been done. Make it as you would, tend it as you might, but if Nature were to be depended upon the loveliest course in all Spain would have to perish, for the climate forbids. So the climate had to be foiled. Water was needed, water everywhere, water always, always. The Madrid golfers, wise beyond all British example, determined they would have their water at the very beginning of things. Some way distant there was a river or canal, and it was tapped for their supply. Great cemented aqueducts were built to carry it across valleys; it was piped through hills. The water in abundance was brought up here to the course; and it was laid on to every teeing ground and putting green and to the entire fairway so that everywhere, always, the water should be poured on, the fine grass that grows should be kept always green, and the turf, which is of full sandy kind, should be always golflike and moist. That was a splendid achievement. I enjoyed the round of the new course, delighted in a pretty valley hole towards the end, and admired the enterprise of the Spanish golfers exceedingly. They have golf in Madrid. As the express climbed with me upwards back to France I reflected again on these wild contrasts, and the struggle for light by Spain.

§

As a pursuit golf differs from all others in that there is no exclusively right way and no utterly wrong way of doing anything connected with it. Those engaged with it are constantly, to use their own expression, finding out what they are "doing wrong," and then with great eagerness and activity and newly revived hope are setting forth to repair their errors and place their game upon a new foundation. Yet despite this eternal discovery of faults and remedies, only a little is ever found out of the full truth that is hidden somewhere, by even the very best of players, and herein lies the consolation of the humbler people in that, if they know little, their superiors, being champions, know only a little more compared with all that there is to be known. Thus upon every disappointment an encouragement ensues. If these points are considered it will appear that there are deep truths in them, while at the same time they convey morals and point the way to a betterment of one's game. And the most important point is that there is no one exclusively correct way of doing anything, and this, with all the circumstances surrounding the proposition, leads us inevitably to the conclusion that this is no game for narrow-minded and conventional people, who would always do as others do, and have not the will to exercise their own convictions which, along with their admiration for some of the tenets of the political party to which they do not belong, are stifled in their consciences and put away. Golf is indeed a game for extensive individualism, for the free exercise of convictions and for continual groping along unknown channels of investigation in search of the truth. Those who do not investigate and explore in this way miss a full three-fourths of the intellectual joy of this pastime. And the investigators must have the courage to reject things of information that are offered to them, even when conveyed with the very highest testimonials for their efficacy from the best champions of home and foreign countries, while at the same time they should have the will to put into exercise even the most fantastic scheme of their own imagination.

All dogmatic teaching in golf is wrong. There are two or three essential principles as we have called them - the keeping of the still head, the fixed centre in the body, the eye on the ball, and such like - which must be obeyed under the certain penalty of failure, because these might be said to be the laws of Nature as applied to golf, and have nothing to do with the eccentricities of human method. But, these being properly respected, there are innumerable ways of building upon them structures of golf which, in the goodness of results in the matter of getting threes and fours and winning the holes, are much the same at the finish. One of the structures may be precise, another may be plain, a third may be ornate, and a fourth may be rough and vulgar. Yet in efficiency and in results they may be just the same, and in most cases the man is led to his style of golf building largely by his own temperamental case. So long as the essential principles are observed in each case, being the same always but kept hidden in the recesses of the building, many things may be done that the books do not teach. The books are valuable to the utmost for their suggestions and for bringing the player back to his base, as it were, when he has wandered too far in his explorations, piled theory on theory and got his game into the most hopeless tangle. For corrective purposes they are in this way quite essential. They stand for the conventions and for the middle ways; they enable us to make a fresh start. And the golfer is always making fresh starts. What is the cherished belief of to-day is abandoned next week, the discovery just made and looked upon as solving the last problem that keeps the handicap man away from scratch, is found later to be a temporary convenience only and to be dependent on something else in the system of a highly fleeting and uncertain kind. These beginnings, this starting over again with increased hope, add always to the pleasure.