h_.

GOLF.

While pheasant-shooters are enjoying the first day of the season, the
votaries of a sport not less noble, though less noisy, are holding the
great festival of their year. The autumn meeting of the Royal and
Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews is in full swing, and the words will
suggest pleasant memories to many a golfer. Golf is not one of the more
brilliant and famous pastimes of the day, though it yields to none in
antiquity and in unassuming merit. The names of the winners of the gold
medal and of the silver cross are not telegraphed all over the world as
widely as Mr. Tennyson's hero wished the news that Maud had accepted him
to be. The red man may possibly "dance beneath his red cedar tree" at
the tidings of the event of one of our great horse-races, or great
university matches. At all events, even if the red man preserves his
usual stoicism of demeanour, his neighbours, the pale-faces, like to know
all about the result of many English sports the moment they are decided.
Golf, as we have said, excites less general enthusiasm; but in people who
love it at all, the love is burning, consuming; they will talk golf-shop
in season and out of season. Few persons, perhaps, will call golf the
very first and queen of games. Cricket exercises more faculties of body,
and even of mind, for does not the artful bowler "bowl with his head?"
Football demands an extraordinary personal courage, and implies the
existence of a fierce delight in battle with one's peers. Tennis, with
all its merits, is a game for the few, so rare are tennis-courts and so
expensive the pastime. But cricketers, football-players, tennis-players,
would all give golf the second place after their favourite exercise; and
just as Themistocles was held to be the best Greek general, because each
of his fellows placed him second, so golf may assert a right to be
thought the first of games. One great advantage it certainly has--it is
a game for "men" of all ages, from eight, or even younger, to eighty. The
links of St. Andrews are probably cleared just now of the little lads and
the veterans, they make room for the heroes, the medalists, the great
players--Mr. Mackay, Mr. Lamb, Mr. Leslie Balfour, and the rest. But at
ordinary times there are always dozens of tiny boys in knickerbockers and
scarlet stockings, who "drive out" the first hole in some twenty strokes
of their little clubs, and who pass much of their time in fishing for
their