IT seems a long time ago, that year away back in the seventies, when I first handled a golf club. In the northern town where I was born, golf was an ancient institution, how ancient nobody knew, for, as in most Scotch places with a seaside links, the game had pursued an intermittent course through the centuries, and there were long periods when it had apparently died out. The local club, however, even then, had regular minutes dating back to the year of Waterloo, and there were ancient trophies and records, which gave token of much older societies that had flourished at various periods back to the fifteenth century.

In view of recent developments and the enormous popularity which the game enjoys to-day, these twenty years of golf have a curious interest, as one looks back on them. At the period of which I write, although young Tom Morris and Davie Strath were then at their best, there was comparatively little golf played, even in Scotland. Musselburgh and St. Andrews had, of course, always their quantum of players, for they were the headquarters of the "Honourable Company" and the "Royal and Ancient" respectively, and were besides the residence of all the best professional players. But in the other Scottish towns, even where there were excellent links, there were but few golfers, and the game was played with but little enthusiasm. The keenest players were of the artisan class, and the members of the local club were middle-aged and elderly business men, the lawyers, bankers, and doctors of the town, who came to the links occasionally for an afternoon round. None of these were good players, and they exhibited a most astonishing variety of style. No young man played, at least as an amateur, and as boys, we despised the game or thought nothing about it, and devoted all our schoolboy energies to cricket and football.

It was my elder brother who was the first to fall under the spell of golf. Leaving me at school, he went to college when he was eighteen, and one day, during a stroll on the links, he followed the young professional who was playing in a match. This young fellow was a fine player, with a beautiful style, and my brother, at the completion of his game, purchased a cleek from him. He now spent all his spare time on the links, and all his spare money on clubs and balls. He constantly played with the professional, and made astonishing progress. At the end of a year he joined the golf club, and signalised his entrance by winning all the club prizes from scratch in his first year of membership. These doings of his naturally excited my own curiosity and interest, and on Saturdays, when there was no cricket, I began also to go to the links, and play with a cleek which he lent me. To make a long story short, I, too, became badly bitten with the game, and many a night we sat up, remaking and hammering and painting golf balls, and practising swings before the looking-glass. Our room was at the top of the house, and its ceiling, which was rather low, soon became covered with the indentations made by our club-heads as we swung them in practice.

Our carpet, the pattern and colour of which I can see distinctly at this moment, amongst a mass of other devices, had a number of round red spots about the size of a golf-hole, dotted at intervals of about six feet over its surface. Many a time, when Greek verbs and Latin versions became a weariness, we would put aside for a little, our Greek Lexicon or our "Liddel and Scott," and engage in a friendly golf match on our home green ! The legs of the table formed hazards, and the game was to make the ball remain upon the red spot. If it passed over it, another stroke had to be played until such time as it rested fairly on "the red." The game required no little delicacy of touch, besides an intimate acquaintance with the inequalities of the floor. Then there was lofting of golf balls from the hearthrug into a hat placed on the bed, with a portmanteau behind it to stop the balls. We even tried our hands at club-making, but from lack of proper tools and appliances the results were not of a satisfactory nature. We devoured all the scanty golfing literature that was then obtainable, and all our thought and all our conversation, was of the links, of golf clubs and balls, and of young Tom Morris and the other great ones of whom we had heard.

Two things held us back and curbed our youthful enthusiasm. One was lack of cash, for golf, played even in the most economical way, costs money; and the other was a Spartan parent. My father, of whom I speak with all the tender recollection, and all the love and reverence which I feel for his memory, was one of the old school. He had never played even cricket himself - his only sport had been fishing - and he had no understanding of the fascination of the hitting of a ball. He had no sympathy with us in our sports, and always looked upon the time we devoted to them as so much taken from "our books," to the study of which he was always exhorting us. Needless to say, therefore, we played many a cricket match of which he heard no word. No matter if we had made chief score or bowled out half the other side, the subject was never mentioned in the family circle. If by any chance some report of our prowess reached his ears, his only comment was a regret that we should neglect our "books." My brother, however, though his golfing exploits, duly chronicled in the newspapers, were received in chilling silence at home, justified himself, more or less, in the parental eye, by winning a bursary at college.

This had a twofold effect, for while it mollified my father, the surplus cash, after paying college fees, provided us with the sinews of war, and we were able to pursue the game with all the ardour we felt for it.

Such was my enthusiasm for the game, that to become undisputed possessor of a cleek of my brother's, of which I only had the loan, I got up at five o'clock every winter morning, for three months, to read to him his notes and translation of the "Alcestis," while he read the text, in preparation for his examination. I reaped the benefit of this two years later, when I followed him to college, and in my second year read the same play.