One pleasant day when staying at Montreal I went out to Dixie, a few stations along the Grand Trunk line, where there is the course of the Royal Montreal Club, to be regarded now as the oldest properly established club in the Dominion. This one alone has that title of Royal which Queen Victoria gave it permission to use in 1884. In its early days the course was in Mount Royal Park, overlooking Montreal. Out here at Dixie a certain flavour of the old spirit and good strong sporting simplicity of the game are tasted. The course is somewhat flat and parky, and big banks of bunkers stretch across the fairway, making the general style of the architecture very much of the Victorian, but the undulations and unevennesses of the banks and hollows are redeeming features. Some of the holes are good and the putting greens are excellent, but generally the course suffers from the absence of testing second shots. There is a magnificent view up the river from the seventh tee. A house agent might honestly declare that the club-house is commodious and comfortable. It was made before it was the fashion to erect palaces on golf courses, and sheet-iron bulks largely in its composition; yet it is cosy enough inside, and contains many relics of peculiar interest. In a glass case there are some ancient clubs with which members played in the early days, and a leather belt for which they competed, the names of the winners being written on the inside.

There are many other courses in Montreal and round about it. There is the Beaconsfield Club with its place situated some way up the river, reached by the G.T.R. at Point Claire. The part of Fletcher's Fields in Mount Royal Park, on which the Royal Montreal Club first played, is now in the occupation of the Metropolitan Club, and is only about five minutes' ride by car from the centre of the city. On the eastern slope of Mount Royal is the course of the Outremont Club, which, at the time of my visit, was about to go forward to a new and great enterprise; while on a plateau at the western end of Mount Royal are the nine holes of the West Mount Club, most charmingly situated, with fine views of the city and the river.

At Ottawa there is a course which ranks high among the very best on the continent. It is different in character from that at Dixie, for here there are ravines and gullies, and the land is strongly undulating everywhere. The bunkers and other hazards are natural, the putting greens are smooth, and the subsoil is of sandy loam. It is on the other side of the Ottawa River, beyond Hull, and owing to its being exposed to a broad reach of the stream it is seldom that there is not much wind blowing across it. And there are courses all the way from east to west of this wonderful, blossoming Canada. We find that wherever we wander in the Dominion we are not much distant from a golf club. Even when on a day I sailed across Lake Ontario and made the Gorge Valley trip to the Niagara Falls there was golf near by had it been wanted. Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, round and about the Rockies, and up them too - everywhere the game is played. I was told that when the course at St. John, New Brunswick, was started in 1897, Mr. H. H. Hansard, who made the opening stroke, holed from the tee in one. Holes in one have been done in many curious circumstances, but surely this is one of the most interesting of all. Compare the excellent beginning of St. John with what happened the other day when a new course was being started here at home. I am sorry to say that the municipal dignitary upon whom the chief responsibility was cast missed the ball the first time, and also the second, but contrived to move it from the tee at the third attempt.

A note has just reached me from a friend in the Dominion saying that out on the Gulf of Georgia, on the coast of Vancouver, they are reaching forward to a golf ideal. They have planned and started there a new town, which they have called Qualicum, of which the golf course is the central feature. They have laid out a fine one along the shore, one that has splendid natural qualities, and they are doing their best to make it understood that here is a golf city if ever there was one, for they have christened the streets and roads by such names as St. Andrews Road, Berwick Road, Portrush Road, Rye Road, Sandwich Road, and Dolly-mount Road; and there are others with the names of Hoylake, Sunningdale, and all the rest of our British best.

Friends whom I consulted in the matter declared there was no golf in Quebec, little but French people, French talk, and French games of two generations back, the Canadian French not yet having adopted the sport to which so many of the Parisians have attached themselves with great earnestness. I was barely satisfied with such denials, and when, after another night on the C.P.R., I found myself on a glorious Sunday morning on those famous heights of Quebec, whence the view is one of the most magnificent in the world, I set about investigating the matter all alone. I can hardly say why, but somehow I strongly suspected the Plains of Abraham, the big, bare piece of land on the heights overlooking the St. Lawrence, on which Wolfe and Montcalm, more than a century and a half ago, fought that great fight, and died. I have always found it as a most remarkable thing that where great battles have been waged, and big encampments made, golf courses in a great number of cases have been laid out there later. Sure enough, then, the game was here on the Plains of Abraham. I had just been looking upon the pillar with the simple inscription, "Here died Wolfe victorious," and had walked for the length of two or three good drives towards the citadel end of the plain, called, I think, the Cove Fields, when putting greens came to view, with sticks not two feet long and bits of red rag attached to them in the holes. The greens and the teeing grounds were rough as could be, and there were no proper bunkers on the course, but plenty of trouble for all that, the ground being coarse and stony. The public could roam about the place just as it pleased, and did so, and there did not seem to be anything to prevent any one from playing the game on this course. It looked just like public golf on common land, and though it is a far cry from Blackheath to Quebec, there is something in the nature and character of this golfing ground at the historic Canadian port to remind one of England's oldest and crudest course. I discovered afterwards that the Quebec Golf Club, a club without a club-house, had acquired the rights to play on it; that this club is one of comparatively early origin; that its members are clearly primitive in their tastes, but sincere and earnest; and I am led to the belief that the course has another point of similarity with Blackheath, being the oldest now in existence on the American continent. It is said that a daughter of old Tom Morris, who married a Mr. Hunter and went to America, was largely responsible for the beginning of golf at Quebec. Men and boys were playing on it on this beautiful Sunday morning when the bells in countless steeples of Quebec and at St. Levis on the other side of the St. Lawrence were ringing their music through the stillest air. I sat down on the edge of the course overlooking the precipitous depths to the river, far down below, where the smoke from a warship at anchor came lazily from the funnels, and looked for long enough to gain an undying impression of one of the grandest panoramas in the world, seen at its most peaceful and its best. Nature had a grand inspiration when she made Quebec as now we find her.