There is one hole in the world where you do get paid for achieving a I, that is if you happen to do it at either the Easter, Whitsuntide, or Autumn meetings. This is what is called the "Island Hole" on the course of the Royal Ashdown Forest Club in Sussex. It is an excellent hole, and a gentleman who played it on one occasion fell so much in love with it that he endowed it with a sum of £5, the accumulated interest on the sum to go to the competitor at any of the meetings named who should do this trick of getting it in 1. Ever since the endowment was made the interest has been growing and growing, and nobody has qualified for it. Money accumulates so fast once it gets a fair start, that we can imagine this interest some day amounting to a fortune, and then what a scene there will be at the Island Hole at Easter when the golfer, having been training at the Redan, the Maiden, and a few like holes for a whole month previously, comes here with weird clubs and balls made of lead, and has greed written in large characters across his face.

The moral of the hole in 1 is excellently stated by a great master of the game. It demands not only a perfect shot but a perfect fluke. It is a case of the gods giving to them that have, and those that have not are cast into the bunker in front of the green.

IV

Curious, indeed, arc some items in the list of the feats of golf. In the game heroic there is testimony to the pluck, perseverance, and enthusiasm of Mr. J. W. Spalding, who in the spring of a recent season came by an awful motor smash in France and lost an eye, but had no sooner risen from the hospital bed and been sent to Italy to recuperate than he was at his golf again, playing himself back with his single eye to the game of scratch quality that he enjoyed before, and - good for you, Mr. Spalding - but a few weeks went by ere one more scratch medal came his way. Nor shall we forget how a popular champion struggled home to the seventy-second green at Prestwick while the blood was oozing from his lungs.

There are feats of other kinds, as those which count as freaks, poor things enough but wondered at by some. What shall we say of the Pittsburg golfer who wagered four thousand dollars that he could play a ball over four and a half miles of the city streets in one hundred and fifty strokes ? Beginning at five o'clock in the morning, he did this thing in one hundred and nineteen strokes, but lost a thousand dollars in damage done to property on the way. That man found an emulator in London who undertook to play a ball from Ludgate Circus to a fountain basin in Trafalgar Square. There are men who like to drive fine balls from the glass faces of other people's expensive watches, and others who prefer the tamer sport of driving from the eggs of hens. There was the man of Sandwich, who, with a champagne bottle as his only "club," played, and - Oh, shame upon it! - beat a neophyte who carried a full bag of the most improved clubs. There was the old-time golfer who lofted balls over the spire of St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, and another who tooled his gutty from Bruntsfield Links to the top of Arthur's Seat. Better and more purposeful was the practice which Mr. Laidlay used to undertake before championships, when, with Jack White for caddie, he would play a ball from the first tee at North Berwick to the Roundell Hole at Gullane, six miles away, by way of the Eel Burn Hole, the sands along the shore, the neighbourhood of the fishermen's cottages, and away over Muirfield and the rough country to the top of the hill, playing from whatever lie his ball chanced to find, and once doing this course in a total of ninety-seven strokes.

V

Do we not sometimes hear one sort of sportsmen make it a complaint against golf, that the player does not run any personal risk of injury to his life or his limbs? Some of these men will tell you that you only arrive at real sport when such dangers are incurred. It may be so, but we shall not on that account seek to increase the risks of golf. It is one of the glories of the game that it is such fine sport and commands the wild enthusiasm of the best sportsmen, though it threatens the life neither of the player nor any of the living creatures made by God that give the fulness to Nature, and add, though it may be unconsciously, to the golfer's joy as he strides over the links on a fine morning. In other sports, when man goes wandering over the hills, he takes his gun with him that he may kill something. Leave him alone with Nature, and as the lord of creation he is impelled to go forward to the attack on the lesser beings. In golf alone does he roam over the country and by the side of the sea with never a thought of what he may kill passing through his mind. He has a great joy in his own life, and he is all benevolence and wishful for the happy life of others.

Things have been killed - accidentally - at golf. Many luckless birds have got in the way of tee shots, and even a fish lost its life on a golf course, and is now in a glass case in the clubhouse at Totteridge. By some devious means it got on to the course one day when there had been heavy rains and much overflowing all about. And - let it be whispered to the shooters and the mighty hunters! - men have been maimed, and even killed on golf links, though we pray that, despite the extra sport, there may be no more of them, and that the single pain of the game may be the skin-blisters and corns that sometimes will come up at the bottom of the left forefinger and elsewhere. I did not think better of golf as a sport when one day, in playing my way outwards on the North Berwick links, a ball from a hidden tee came upon me unawares and carried the pipe that I was smoking away with it for some twenty or thirty yards, while I stood to wonder what was happening. And even by his own deeds may a man courts perils, for we heard the other day that one was playing at Ravenscar when he took a full mashie shot with the object of clearing a stone wall; but the ball struck the wall and rebounded with great force against his head. And from his head it rebounded again over the wall, so it was said; and it was not astonishing to hear that the player was slightly stunned! If adventure in the form of fierce conflict with wild beasts and reptiles is what the full-blooded sportsman wishes, he may have it. A member of the Royal Sydney Club played his ball down a hole, and he put his hand down it to see if he could recover the ball. He seized hold of something soft and drew out a venomous brown snake - which he hurriedly pushed back. I am told by my golfing directory that at Umtala, in Rhodesia, "the course consists of nine holes. In addition to other hazards, lions are occasionally in evidence." I happen to have had some private confirmation of this report, and it is told me that if ever a golfer in Umtala indulged himself in such a freak as golf by candlelight, as players have been known to do elsewhere, he might not complete the game that he had projected, for the king of beasts is accustomed to prowl over the land at night, and picks up any little living thing that he may find about. In other respects there is something quaint about this golf at Umtala, for I am informed that in the daytime the course is frequented by crows with white bands round their necks, which go by the name of "Free Kirk Ministers." They are thieves, and now and again they swoop down and fly away again with the ball.