In this that I have written I may seem to neglect my theme, and yet the state of Spain does most closely concern the strange case of golf in the country. Here is an answer to interrupters who are quick to say that one does not go to Madrid for golf. When Spain was all romance and colour, all dirt and laziness, it was no place for games like this. Bicycles were not popular then because they had to be pedalled ceaselessly, or the riders would fall: they, being as symbols of action, did not permit of lounging or a little slumber. In the days of the first and second Madrids athletics could not be contemplated; the corrida was supreme and solitary for Spanish "sport." Now there is an athletic movement. There are many football clubs; there is a national cup competition and the King has given the cup. Still the corrida flourishes, but it is threatened. In the new movement for the third Madrid there are social clubs such as we have in London. There is an inclination tor strong, healthy sport, and the King encourages it with all his royal might and influence. Don Alfonso has been the good leader of the royal game in Spain. The main point is that golf in these days is a token of a healthier disposition and a new progress, and it is a strong influence upon character. In the old Spain such a sport as this was quite impossible; now it grows, and, to me as one who has considered the birth and rise of golf in many countries, the case of Spain is deeply interesting. When I went there I remembered what some of the thoughtful and candid Americans had said about this game exerting a needed and subtle influence upon their own national character. It is such influences that are needed in Spain, and I shall go again among the Madrilenos to see this one in the working. Already they have courses, nice and tolerable, in Barcelona, Bilbao, and many other provincial places. When I went to San Sebastian, one of the most beautiful and fully equipped seaside resorts in the whole world, the municipal authorities assured me that they felt a fear that the bull-fights were becoming a doubtful attraction to foreign visitors, and they were giving their attention to the establishment of a muncipal golf course. It will be the first municipal golf course on the continent of Europe.

Let me plunge to my revelation and state that Madrid, in New Castile, land of the toreador, country where so much of the Middle Ages does yet survive, where games till lately have been almost unknown, this Madrid comes now to be possessed of such a first-class course as might be the envy of many a British seaside resort. While I lingered in the city Senor Fabricio de Potestad, one of the most active members of the general committee of the Madrid Golf Club, and of its green committee too, was a kind counsellor and guide. Just as might happen at home, while at breakfast at the Ritz there came to me notice that the car was waiting. Senor de Potestad, his clubs and mine inside the car, had the golfer's expectancy upon a genial Spanish countenance, rubbed hands, and declared it was a fine day for the game. We sped away from the Prado, and considered handicaps and odds as golfers must. But first we went for object lessons in the progress of Spanish golf. Three or four miles out we reached the hippodrome where some nine years back the game was born. Don Alfonso had been learning golf in England; he had striven with it in a left-handed way while he wooed a British princess in the Isle of Wight, and he gave a Spanish decoration then to the professional who showed him how to hold his hands and where to put his feet. Then nine simple stupid little holes were laid out in this hippodrome, and there they still remain as relics of the earliest age in the golf history of this country, the uncultured time when the ball was missed, the days when a hole in nine might have been considered good and a seven enough to make the soul of a great grandee quiver with a new found joy. Three Spaniards stood forward with the King as the pioneers of Spanish golf, and still they are among its leaders. There was a great sportsman, the Duke of Alva, president of the club; there was the Marquis de Santa Cruz, and there was the Senor Pedro Caro, perhaps the only Spanish golfer of early times besides Don Alfonso himself who learned his strokes and swings in England, where he was schooled, and who with the Count de la Cimera and the Count Cuevas de Vera, cousin of my guide, is one of the three best players of Spain. Two of them are Spanish scratch, and the Count de la Cimera lately achieved the distinction of being the first of his land to rise to the eminence of plus one. Thus you may perceive that the golf of Spain is helped by the best people, and that is not because it is fashionable, and it is not only because the King has shown a liking for it, but because the Spaniards have found in it a quick fascination, an awakening pastime, such a strong diversion from the often heavy life of their country as they had not imagined. Had you seen, as I did, the Duke of Aliaga bunkered one afternoon before a high steep cliff in front of the eighteenth green on the second oldest course of Madrid; had you seen him pensive as he felt the extraneous sorrows of a Spanish nobleman of riches and high station; had you seen the gleam of gladness in two Spanish eyes when the ball was heaved somehow to the top in one (the gods may know how he managed it; but we said to him that it was a splendid shot, and I do believe it was!) you would not doubt that golf was meant for Spain as these people declare it was - "the thing of all others that we needed," so they say.

This second oldest course, the "old course" as they begin to call it now, marks the transition period of Spanish golf. It is not the primeval course of the hippodrome, hut one which was made in 1907 at a place apart and a little farther along the road. The land is worth a million and three-quarters of pesetas now when Madrid has become so much bigger than it was, and the course falls within the city zone; and as the players became educated they yearned for something better, and they moved again. But fond memories will cling for long enough to this old course of Spain; with a little help from fancy one may look upon it even now as a kind of old Blackheath of Spanish golf. There is a small club-house with dining-room, dressing-rooms and all complete, in quite the English way, on a spot of rising ground, and from the verandah we may look over a part of the course, with a short hole to begin with and some curious bunkering here and there, with a highly modern attempt to adopt the system of humps-and-hollows bunkering that has been so well established on inland courses at home. Somehow one gathers the impression that the Spaniards have been striving all the time towards some kind of indistinct ideal, realising that the sport they had discovered was a great one and trying to improve their practice of it. And I recall that it was J. H. Taylor, the old designer, the old constructor, the quintuple champion, who was pioneer in the planning of courses in Madrid, and he laid out this one of eighteen holes very well for the early Spanish golfers.