Trees again are not wholly cheering when, as often on a park course, they are large and solitary trees that stand as sentinels, or sometimes in pairs as goal-posts with the green for the goal. It may be cogently argued that they are very good hazards indeed. They punish the crooked and high shot as well as the crooked and low one, being living negations of the statement that 'there are no hazards in the air.'They do not punish equally and that we ought to forgive them, for it is a dull game if there is no luck at all. But they sometimes help with too gross a partiality a very bad shot, and when they do punish they do so in an aggravating manner. To be stymied by a tree trunk and have to putt the ball out on to the fairway is a dull business, nor does it strike one as real golf to try to hit a half-topped shot under overhanging branches at the imminent risk of the ball bounding revengefully back. No, too many trees are depressing. Yet if there are none the game in a park lacks incident.

It was to remedy this state of things that the art of humping and hollowing was given us. The Mid-Surrey course in the Old Deer Park at Richmond is the classic example of 'humps and hollows.' It is hard when we play there now to remember it as it used to be. Then there was nothing but two little spinneys, a stray tree or two, a carpet of fine turf centuries old, and a number of very bad bunkers cut in meticulously straight lines across the course and having perpendicular edges. To-day there are everywhere artistically irregular chains of grassy hills with little pits of sand nestling here and there amongst them. There are greens guarded and flanked on either side by grassy hollows: there are plateau greens that dominate the surrounding lowlands. All this is obviously artificial : the ground is so flat that the most skilful architecture cannot deceive us altogether: but it is a marvellous transformation. A friend of mine says that the course provides an examination in golf rather than a game of golf. It is not an altogether unjust criticism, but I think he underrates the good fun to be got out of being examined there.

This chapter only deals with types of course, and so there are many famous links left unmentioned-Westward Ho!, for instance, and Deal and Muirfield. But there is one inland course that must have a separate word or two, because it is not quite like any other. It is, I think, or rather it will be when more trampled and hardened by the human foot, the best I ever saw. This is Gleneagles in Perthshire. It can hardly be assigned to any known type. It is hilly in that we climb up steep hills and long for a moving staircase. Yet we do not play up and down the hills, but along the narrow winding valleys in between them that have a reminiscent flavour of Sandwich. It is not a typical heather course, though there is heather there, and very thick heather too. The turf is excellent and yet it is not a sandy course, for I believe the sand had to be imported for the bunkers. There are a few trees and plenty of rough and tenacious grass: yet anything less like a park course cannot be imagined. More than anything else it impresses one with its grandeur: it is conceived on a bigger scale than any other course I ever saw, the nearest approach in this respect to it being the National Golf Links on Long Island. Not even champions can make it look small, and how dreadfully small it makes us all look who are not champions! To stand on the tee to a certain hole known as 'Braid's brawest' with the wind blowing against one is to feel like a pigmy attempting to hit a cannon ball. If any young spark wants to appreciate his exact position in the golfing firmament he had better go to Gleneagles. He will not come back a sadder man, for it is a glorious spot, but he should certainly come back a wiser one.