The course on a chalk down has an atmosphere entirely of its own. If we are light-hearted, it may be very amusing: if we are too serious and are trying to defeat a player with local knowledge, it will make us tear our hair. The former is the right mental attitude, for the turf is a joy to walk on, though often not to putt on; the ball precipitates itself for joyous distances down mountain sides, it soars gloriously over chasms and ravines, and nowhere does the wind blow more divinely fresh. There are causes for irritation if we allow them to be so. There is, for instance, the green like a gun-platform cut out of the side of a hill. Play almost any kind of shot to one side of the green and the ball will come bounding and kicking down on to the green. Play just an inch too low on the other side and the best shot is like the worst. Yet if there is no gun-platform the circumstances may be yet more frightful: we have a green sloping with an equable steepness which makes any shot from above the hole practically impossible.

Some people may know the course at Royston near Cambridge, where there is a great view over the surrounding plain and a stretch of undulating down broken by steep-sided ravines that are perfect natural amphitheatres. There is one hole, the fifth, where a good tee shot-or a bad second-lands the ball at the bottom of one of these ravines. The green is perched on the top of the opposing cliff and calls for a high pitching shot. Now since every one gets to the bottom of the ravine and every one does not replace his divot, the chances of getting a bad lie are considerable. Even with a good lie the shot is alarming, and so we may see people patiently batting the ball up the side of the hill only to see it come rolling back to their feet. Sometimes it hovers for a minute at the very top: the player starts up after it and then back it comes: slowly to begin with and then gathering speed, till it is further off than ever it was.

Again, who that has played at Eastbourne has not watched with amazement turning gradually into despair the local champion aiming in an almost exactly opposite direction to that of the hole and steering the ball over hill and dale till it lies stone dead at last ? But if the putting is despairing on these down courses the driving is soothing to a broken spirit, for as a rule we have the whole British Empire to drive into with never a hazard as far as the eye can reach, save perhaps two small hurdles called a zareba and intertwined with gorse that refuses to grow. Royston used to be the finest driving cure in the world, for the air was like champagne after sluggish, torpid Cambridge, and having perfect liberty to drive crooked, one generally drove straight as an arrow.

Golf on a common has an old-fashioned flavour which is rare and pleasant. It is golf as it used to be played when the great boom was only beginning, when to meet another man with golf-clubs on a railway journey was to hail him as a comrade : when there was considered to be an inexhaustible fund of humour merely in the word niblick, and the passer-by jeered at the golfer as he pursued his ball. There is still as a rule a comparative simplicity about it all which is reminiscent of the old days of the pioneer golfers. The club-house is not too gorgeous, and we expect to wait on ourselves at lunch, to eat bread and cheese and drink beer. There should be plenty of gorse, if the course is to be really typical, a pond, a stray browsing donkey or two, perhaps a family of gypsies encamped and little gypsy children whining and fawning on us for pennies: perhaps also a sturdy old gentleman who regards himself as an outraged commoner and declines to move when we shout 'Fore !'at him. We should never be surprised if we saw some one playing in a weather-worn red coat. We feel that we ought to be talking not about Duncan and Mitchell, but about old Tom Morris, or perhaps Tom Dunn who laid out the course and declared that 'it would be one of the best in the country and second only to St. Andrews.' We may find on the club-house shelf Mr. Hutchinson's delightful Hints on Golf, in its faded greenish-blue cover, and feel that here we ought to read no more modern golfing literature.

Berkhamsted is one such course on a common, and very good it is as well as very pretty. It is not too long, yet of a good length; the gorse waits on either side to punish the smallest aberration in the tee shot, and the greens are beautiful. Limpsfield is another, and so is Holtye in Kent, full of a rural and archaic charm. Every golfer can supply his own instances : the emotion produced in every case is the same and quite unmistakable.

On one or two courses on public commons, which are not so countrified, we must needs walk with silent awe-stricken feet as if on holy ground. Nowhere is this instinct more strongly felt than on Blackheath, where men have been playing since the reign of James 1. and the club-house is full of old clubs and old pictures and old punch-bowls, the relics of jovial golfers long since departed. We know their names from the records of the Club, and how one presented a haunch of venison 'out of the Duke of Rutland's park,' and another gave his 'marriage noggin' on a happy occasion and had his health drunk with acclamation, as was also some year or so later that of the 'young golferess 'who had by that time appeared. Every golfer ought to make a pilgrimage to Black-heath, for it is like no other golf in the world. The pilgrim may not like it : but it may be wholesome by taking a little conceit out of him and also a little over-fastidiousness as to lies and putting-greens. And, if he has eyes to see, he will notice that here is rather a different conception of the game of golf from that to which he has been accustomed. For instance he may see two old gentlemen in red coats, apparently playing together but walking a long way apart. His first notion will be that they have quarrelled. Not at all. Each one of them is taking what he believes the proper line to the hole : they do not agree, but each may be perfectly right. Here are no clear-cut fairway and hard and fast lines of rough. There is the hole in the distance, where stands the fore caddie, and each old gentleman can get there as best he pleases. One may elect to take a short cut: plunge into the ravine and hack his way through the bare and flinty lies that he finds at the bottom. The other will skirt round it, making a detour which he deems politic. There is plenty of scope for taking your own line of country at Black-heath. There is also scope for patience and resource. The pilgrim must not expect that everything will necessarily be made easy for him if he plays the orthodox shot according to the book. He will see a hole on a narrow triangle of turf, in front of which runs a hard high road. 'Oh,' says he, 'a pitch ': but if he pitches over the road he will never stay on that green. He may decide to pitch his ball on the road, or even short of it, and trust to the bound. He may if he likes play a running shot. There is a wrong shot, which is the unimaginative copy-book one : but there is no necessarily right one. The best shot will be the one that gets nearest the hole and it will be futile to accuse his adversary of fluking. Equally futile to lament if his own ball ends, as it very likely will, under the perpendicular granite edge of the road. This is golf at Blackheath : he must just make the best of it and, if he honestly tries to do so, he will get out of it both amusement and instruction.