There is another public course of historic traditions which is very interesting and very singular, namely, that on the North Inch of Perth. Here played the old and young Tom Morris, old Willie Park, and Bob Andrews, 'the Rook,' the greatest of Perth golfers and other great men of a bygone day. Indeed golf has been played there from time immemorial. I once wrote rather too flippantly about it and felt guilty afterwards. So I will say no more than this, that it is worth the seeing and possesses the most difficult hole in the world. The green is a tiny one set on a little triangular island. To the left within a few yards of the flag is the rapid Tay : behind and to the right is a stagnant ditch that harbours predatory little boys: in front is a big bunker which, when I saw it, was full of water. One long full shot would, I suppose, reach the green, but who would be mad enough to try it? Marshal Joffre was credited with the statement that he was 'nibbling ' the Germans. That is the plan of campaign for this historic hole. Nibble at it. Take as many small bites as you please: a large mouthful would be fatal.

The neighbourhood of London, and more particularly the county of Surrey, is now full of admirable courses, of which the ingredients are sand, heather, and fir-trees. Sunningdale, Walton Heath, Woking, Swinley Forest, St. George's Hill, Worplesdon, Addington, Coombe Hill, Camberley Heath-these are only some of them. They differ greatly in details, but there is a general similarity between them. They have all been made by a more or less ruthless attack upon nature. Some by the rooting up of heather only, others by laying waste whole forests and blowing up the roots of the trees with dynamite. They represent the last word in the architect's triumphal achievement. Really to appreciate them one should first see the place where the course is to be, if possible before a tree is cut. I spent a long, fine winter day with Mr. Colt at St. George's Hill while it was yet untouched, and we had often to fight our way through brambles and thick undergrowth. I remember some of the pretty little nooks and corners in the woods, but I have never been able to identify them on the course as it is to-day. The whole face of nature has been changed, and where we walked and where was the dell under the big trees in which we ate our sandwiches, I have not now the faintest idea. It is all a woodland dream. In the same way I saw Mr. Abercromby's two creations, Coombe Hill and Addington, when they were still very much in the rough, and have the same tangled recollections, which will not fit in with the courses as they are. It is a mystifying experience, and nothing is quite so mysterious as the way in which the architect can map out his whole course in considerable detail when in many places he can only see a few yards in front of him. True he has a map to work on, and 'experientia does it,'as Mrs. Micawber's papa used to say; but even so, the man must surely have a sixth sense, some inexplicable gift akin to the water-finder's.

When they are finally made these courses have a good many features in common. Glades of green radiate this way and that from the club-house, fringed on either side with darker heather or trees. They are generally what I may call sound protestant courses, because there is no room there for the doctrine of purgatory. We are either in heaven on the fairway, or in hell in the rough. This affects different golfers in different ways. Some suffer badly from claustrophobia: others rather enjoy the sensation of having a perfectly definite amount of licence allowed them and no more. Those two clear-cut lines make it easier for them to do what all do not find easy, namely, to aim straight and get their feet in their right places. I have known those who played habitually on heathery courses to be utterly at sea, when they came to one where the rough was of the same colour as the fairway. They feel that they can drive 'all over the place,' and do so accordingly and most disastrously.

A profuse exhibition of fiendishly ingenious short holes is another feature of these courses. Once upon a time two out of eighteen was considered the orthodox and respectable number of short holes, because there were two at St. Andrews. Gradually the number has been increased, till at Addington we find six ranging from a chip with a mashie-niblick to a full brassy shot. And wonderfully good these short holes are as a rule, with their hog's back ridges to kick the ball away that is played well but not quite well enough, and their greedy pot-bunkers that come cranking and serpentining right into the green with never a hint of leniency anywhere.

All this is in a way artificial : it is very unlike that simple natural golf on a common, where we cannot cut down the gorse to put a hole there, but put the hole where there is no gorse. But it is saved from the ugliness and stiltedness of artifice by the skill of the architect. He may be said to have learned to alter and improve upon nature by imitating nature. Give him only a flat bit of ground, and he will make you banks and braes and plateaux that might have been imported from St. Andrews. But he only does that when he is forced to do it. First of all he uses the natural roll of the ground, for he has realised that a ridge can be just as effective a defence to a green as an artificial bunker, and a great deal prettier.

As contrasted with the heathery courses the park courses cast a gentle melancholy upon the soul. They give me in imagination a feeling of water oozing in over the tops of my shoes from the long wet grass: of worm-casts and lumps of mud adhering to the ball on the green: of finding the ball wreathed round by the fantastic roots of a tree. And yet the golf is often both good and interesting. What is it that makes it sometimes comparatively dull? I am inclined to think that one reason is to be found in the rough, which consists only of thick and matted grass. It is thoroughly efficient: it punishes the crooked player, but efficiency is not necessarily thrilling : efficient people are often abominably tedious company. There is an often-quoted saying of a well-known Scottish golfer when asked as to a certain kind of grass: 'There is only one kind of grass-green grass.' That is too often the trouble in a park: the rough and the fairway are both green grass: we miss the purple of the heather sadly.