Of course, the story is not complete at this. Fine turf and a prosperous club do not necessarily make good holes. But St. Jean-de-Luz has holes as good as most in Europe. They would even be good on a first-class inland course in Britain. They are, thanks to the broad undulations of the land, good in character. The round is opened with a fine two-shotter of a full four hundred yards, with an incline against the player from the tee. The drive must be properly placed, and that is the case nearly all the way round. The second is a pretty short hole; the third presents a fearsome drive across a yawning quarry; at the fourth the return over it is made in the progress to the longest hole, one of five hundred and fifty yards, and so on to the end, some of the middle holes being very good, the seventeenth a fine full one-shot hole, and a good drive and iron of three hundred and eighty yards downhill to terminate. The view from the seventeenth and eighteenth tees, the town of St. Jean-de-Luz shining in the sun, the Nivelle pressing itself into it, and the pretty harbour white-flaked with the waves, is peaceful and pleasant, and it gives that sense of "going home" which one always likes to have when playing the last holes of a round.

The game itself is not everything in the golfing life; it attaches other occupations and diversions as necessities to itself which are all added to the sum of "a day's golf" and make of it a thing of adventure and time packed with variety of deed and thought. There is the meeting and the parting; the lunch time and - everything! Chiefly there is the journey, and has it been properly considered how golf and the car have been linked together for a magnificent combination of sporting joy? In the remembrances of every player there must be happy and stirring episodes of motoring to and from the game. I have hundreds of them, apart from all those countless pretty spins on the outskirts of London town. Motoring for golf is an entirely different thing from motoring for nothing.

The golf-motoring out from Paris to Fontainebleau and the other places round the capital of France is unforgettable, and always will there be clear cut in my mind the details of an expedition I once made to this Nivelle, St. Jean-de-Luz, at a time when lounging golfless in the north of Spain. It is not frequently that we go crossing frontiers in motor-cars and having our clubs examined with wonderment and irritating inquiry by officers of the douane twice in the day, going and returning, for just two rounds of the best of games. Nor is it a common thing that in one day English golfers should speed along in a German car from Spain to France and from France back again to Spain to play on a splendid course with French and Scottish opponents - a considerable mixture, if you like. I was idling at San Sebastian when the aforesaid Mr. Sharp, with such thought and kindness as golfers display towards each other, gave greeting and said, "Come to Nivelle again for a day of play." But how? It was thirty miles away, and those trains, with changes at Irun and Bayonne, would be most fearfully slow. "Bother the trains!" said Sharp, "what are motors for, and particularly what may be my own car for? Say the time when you will have risen and bathed and taken your cafe complete and it will have gone over to San Sebastian by then." So it came about that it was waiting at the door of my hotel at eight o'clock in the morning. Coats were buttoned up, pipes were lighted, and when the first quarter was being chimed from the church steeples we were already doing our thirty to forty miles an hour through the hilly suburbs of San Sebastian. There are such hills in Spain and France between San Sebastian and St. Jean-de-Luz as you can hardly think of; but the speed dial showed that we flashed up some of them at thirty and darted down the other side at sixty-five. Great hills to the left with jagged skylines and strange formations as go by such names as "Camel's back "; and such sweet vales with mountains framing them over on the right! Hereabouts is some of the prettiest scenery of Spain, and I hope not to forget how on that glorious morning the mists of the new day dissolved in the warming sunlight, and the opalescent gossamer that had clung about those peaks of Spain gave place to strong blues and greys, and then to shimmering rose. At Irun, on the Spanish side of the frontier, the car's papers had to be shown, then we bowled over the dividing river, and at Hendaye the Frenchmen asked their questions and did their looking into things. Then up a steep hill for the last, and in a few minutes we were gliding down into St. Jean-de-Luz, all of this heartening business done within the hour. At the end of the day, two rounds done, when the sun was setting, I was swung again over those Spanish tracks, and just when the light had completely failed and a few spots of rain came beating upon the glass the sixty horses in the Benz had done their duty. I opened the casement of my room at the Maria Christina; soft sounds from the sea floated in, and soothed one to a pensive mood.

The case of the golf of Pau is curious. Here, so far away from Britain, far from Paris, four hours even from the coast at Biarritz, inland and hugging closely to the Pyrenees, we have positively one of the oldest golf clubs in the whole world. At the beginning there was Blackheath, and then there were the Edinburgh Burgess, the Honourable Company, the Royal and Ancient, Aberdeen, and two or three other clubs. Golf, growing up, made its first leap across the seas to Calcutta in 1829, and seventeen years afterwards it settled in Bombay. It first landed in Europe in 1856, and was definitely and thoroughly established at Pau, and has remained there flourishing ever since. This circumstance is the more curious when we reflect that at that time there was no golf about London except at Blackheath. The Royal Wimbledon and the London Scottish Clubs were then unborn. Such great institutions now as the Royal Liverpool Club at Hoylake and the Royal North Devon at Westward Ho! were undreamt of, and a boy child might have been born to a golfer at Pau and grown almost to middle age before the Royal St. George's Club at Sandwich was begun. Scots, of course, were at the bottom of all this pioneering work. The early Blackheath golfers were Scots; they carried the game to Westward Ho!; they fostered it in India, and some of them went off with it to Pau, where they liked to spend the winter in the warm sunshine and in air which for sweet softness is almost incomparable. Over the fireplace in the smoking-room of the club-house is a picture of three of the founders of the club, who were still living in 1890 - Colonel Hutchinson, Major Pontifex, and Archbishop Sapte. Another of those founders was Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Lloyd-Anstruther. Thus it happens that the charm of age and long settlement hang upon the golf of Pau as they do upon no other golf club in Europe. Here, as not elsewhere, you feel impressed upon you the dignity of golf, realise that it is not a thing of to-day or of yesterday, and there are almost the same deep pleasure and elevation of spirit and feeling when you come to such a place after wandering among newnesses elsewhere as there are in abiding for a while at St. Andrews or North Berwick in October, the crowds then being gone away, after a course of southern golf of the most recent preparation.