ers playing _chole_, or _choulle_, and says that they hit
drives of more than 500 yards. Experiments made at Wimbledon
with a Belgian club sent over by M. Charles Michel suggest
that M. Zola has over-estimated the distance. But M. Zola
and M. Deulin agree in making the players _run_ after the
ball. M. Henri Gaidoz adds that a similar game, called
_soule_, is played in various departments of France. He
refers to Laisnel de la Salle. The name _chole_ may be
connected with German _Kolbe_, and _golf_ may be the form
which this word would assume in a Celtic language. All this
makes golf very old; but the question arises, Are the
"holes" to which golfers play of Scotch or of Dutch origin?
There are several old Flemish pictures of golf; do any of
them show players in the act of "holing out"? There is said
to be such a picture at Neuchatel.

A. LANG.]

I

Once upon a time there lived at the hamlet of Coq, near
Conde-sur-l'Escaut, a wheelwright called Roger. He was a good fellow,
untiring both at his sport and at his toil, and as skilful in lofting
a ball with a stroke of his club as in putting together a cartwheel.
Every one knows that the game of golf consists in driving towards a
given point a ball of cherrywood with a club which has for head a sort
of little iron shoe without a heel.

For my part, I do not know a more amusing game; and when the country
is almost cleared of the harvest, men, women, children, everybody,
drives his ball as you please, and there is nothing cheerier than to
see them filing on a Sunday like a flight of starlings across potato
fields and ploughed lands.

II

Well, one Tuesday, it was a Shrove Tuesday, the wheelwright of Coq
laid aside his plane, and was slipping on his blouse to go and drink
his can of beer at Conde, when two strangers came in, club in hand.

"Would you put a new shaft to my club, master?" said one of them.

"What are you asking me, friends? A day like this! I wouldn't give the
smallest stroke of the chisel for a brick of gold. Besides, does any
one play golf on Shrove Tuesday? You had much better go and see the
mummers tumbling in the high street of Conde."

"We take no interest in the tumbling of mummers," replied the
stranger. "We have challenged each other at golf and we want to play
it out. Come, you won't refuse to help us, you who are sai