Every golf course that we know at all well has for us its characteristic atmosphere. It is an elusive thing, very hard to describe in words. It differs with each one of us, not only according to our temperaments and ways of regarding golf, but also according as we come to the course with a feeling of ownership or as guests and comparative strangers. Each course has its individual charm, or sometimes, especially if we play badly there, its individual terror. According to the course for which we are bound on a holiday, we know that we shall meet a particular kind of people and play a particular kind of match and of stroke, and so we have a particular kind of feeling when we are packing up our clubs to go there.

Take for example two famous courses, Sandwich and St. Andrews. There could scarcely be a greater contrast than between these two. The dominant note of Sandwich is one of privacy and peacefulness. It always seems to me the most delightful of all sleepy hollows. We go there by a sleepy train and spend some time drowsing in the sunshine on Minster platform - a sensation redolent of Sandwich. When we do get there we drive up to the clubhouse in an old four-wheeler pulled by a comatose horse. The clump of trees by the club-house is just such a one as is dotted here and there over all that big bare stretch of East Kent, telling of some quiet old farmhouse. And the Sandwich club is a farmhouse that has been changed and glorified. In the club-house we meet the same nice friendly people who are always there playing the same matches. When luncheon is over we potter gently out on to the first tee, and in five minutes we have lost all the other players. They are hidden from us by the great sandhills and we wander through veritable sleepy hollows in an enchanted solitude. Personally I come to Sandwich as a guest, for I do not belong to the club, but I know of no course that gives me a more homelike feeling.

No doubt there are many who come back to St. Andrews with this same feeling. The crowd and the bustle and the hundreds of strange faces strike them as agreeably familiar things. To me, and I fancy to a good many others, it is all quite different. It is exciting and enjoyable to get to St. Andrews : there are plenty of friends always to be met there and the best of good matches to be played, but. it is rather frightening nevertheless. One poor golfer feels such an inconsiderable speck in all that hurly-burly. If there was privacy at Sandwich, here is publicity with a vengeance. It is not of course that any one looks at us, but we never play a shot without feeling that we are surrounded with golfers. It is a wonderful thing to see the whole population of a town pouring out to play: it is a splendid thing that they should be able to do so, but it is also a tiresome thing to have to ballot for a starting time, to be lucky if we get one, to wait and wait on the tees. About golf at St. Andrews there is something of the struggle for life, and it seems to me to have a hardness symbolic of that struggle. It is hard for one reason because it is very good: there is no doubt about that. Then the very ground is hard: so are the caddies in their criticisms. The bunkers are hard on us: we don't know exactly where they are, and so our best shots go into them. Nobody will sympathise with us on that account. We are told that we shall not say such foolish things when we know the links better. Mr. Leslie Balfour-Melville will tell us that it has taken him-shall we say-fifty years to learn the course and that he is learning still. It is good schooling, but we are apt to be rather cowed : to feel that we are not made of quite stern enough stuff, and yearn for something a little more southern and less severely bracing.

These two impressions are purely personal ones. I give them only to try to illustrate what I mean by the characteristic atmospheres of courses. Taking a broader and more general view, the atmosphere must differ primarily according to the type to which a course belongs. Once courses were divided simply into seaside and inland, and the worst seaside golf was held to be in a different class from the best inland. To-day the best seaside golf is still the best of all and, if only because of the wind that blows there and finds out our weaknesses, seaside golf is a thing apart. But we must have many more subdivisions. Some golf courses by the sea, for instance, do not provide the genuine article which is seaside golf. Of such are the courses on the downs perched high on chalk cliffs. Here is really played inland golf, and that of a very peculiar and characteristic kind. The charming course of Le Touquet near Etaples has a golf of its own. There is the sea and sand and tall sandhills, but on the sandhills fir-trees cluster thickly as they might at Sunningdale. The strongest impression that we carry away with us is of the heavenly smell of the firs on a hot sunny day as we drive from a tee made in a clearing in the wood.

Then a little different, again, are the rocky courses by the sea. There are little outcroppings of rock at North Berwick. If we run over Point Garry we shall find rocks in plenty. Classic deeds have been done among them. Willie Park played a left-handed shot from the rocks on to the green in his match with Vardon, and then holed a down-hill putt and won the hole. Major Cecil Hutchison and Mr. Laidlay once tied for a North Berwick medal. They played off and tied again. At the third attempt Mr. Laidlay went over the first hole into the rocks, and played so many shots there that he then and there retired from the fray. Mr. Balfour too once began-and ended-a medal round there. 'The premier made an unfortunate start,'so wrote the euphemistic reporter in telling of the catastrophe. We cannot disregard such historic rocks: they must to some extent colour our impressions. Portsalon on Lough Swilly is an engaging little course where there are rocks here and there, and in particular one fine crag called the Matterhorn over which we must try to drive. At Turnberry in Ayrshire there are holes where our ball bounds playfully off glistening white rocks into deep blue water. On all these courses there is sand in plenty, but the rocks give an exotic touch which differentiates them.