Despite the fact that it was born in 1842 and was really an Indian offshoot of the famous Royal Blackheath Club, the Royal Bombay remains a little primitive in the matter of its course. It is a golf course for one part of the day and something else for the remainder, and it is perhaps the only course in the world which is dismantled daily. The fact is that it is situated on what is called the "maidan," an open space near to the European business quarter, and the golfers, having no exclusive possession of it, are not allowed to play after half past ten in the morning and are required, when they have done, to remove their hazards. This obviously necessitates unconventional obstacles, and the club has had to resort to movable screens, varying from four to ten feet high, which are put up when play begins and taken away again when it is finished. Having become accustomed to this sort of thing it ceases to annoy, and in Bombay the course is considered good and sporting, and the greens are well attended. Then up on the hills at Darjeeling there is the highest golf course in the world, for it is situated at an elevation of more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea on the abandoned cantonment of Seneshal. Scenery often does not count for very much with golfers, and the better the golfer the keener he is on the game and the less does he care at times about the surroundings of the course. Yet, as I am told, it would be a dull poor soul that was not moved by the views from the Darjeeling course, with Mounts Everest and Kinchin-junga, both nearly thirty thousand feet high, in one direction and the plains of Bengal in another. But perhaps the most curious of the Indian courses is that of the Royal Western India Club, upon which is an idgah, or kind of temple, some thirty feet in height and fifty long, with bastions at either end and minarets in the middle. This idgah serves the double duty of club-house and a hazard also, for it has to be driven over from the tee on the way to the eleventh hole, and many are the marks on its walls that were made by balls that were hit too low. The course has another peculiarity in that it possesses seventeen holes only, no amount of ingenuity being enough to scheme out an eighteenth on the land available, so one of them has to be played twice over to make up the usual eighteen. This club has its course at Nasik, and mention of the idgah reminds one that the Royal Bangkok Club of Siam used to have an old and very imposing Siamese temple for a club-house. A little while since, when travelling northwards from Marseilles through France, I met, in the restaurant car of my P.L.M. train, an officer just going home on leave from India, and he assured me that he had found no place in the country where there was no golf, and he gave me some good examples of the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the golfers there. Thus at Multam, for the betterment of their sanded putting "browns" they keep them oiled all over, so that the ball runs evenly along them, and at a reasonable pace. There is an attendant to each green, who smooths over the track that is made by every ball when putted. And my companion told me also that in the season at Gulmurg in Kashmir, where they have two courses, there is such a crowd of golfers that it is difficult to arrange starting times for all of them.

As one would expect, the game is played in Japan, and there is a highly flourishing club at Kobe, whose course is on the top of a high mountain at Rokkosan. It is a splendidly interesting course when reached, with views that can only be second in magnificence to those of Darjeeling; but for the occasional visitor the chief pleasure would seem to lie in the reaching, rather, perhaps, than in golfing on it afterwards, for the players have to go by rickshaw to the foot of the Cascade Valley and are then carried up the mountain slope by coolies for an hour and a half, when at last the tees and bunkers come to view.

Thus it is indicated what great work must have been done by the pioneers of golf. They have been fine adventurers and explorers. In their strength of purpose, their resourcefulness, their enterprise and daring, and in their joy of doing beginnings, they have had some of the burning zeal and the quick inspirations of the voyagers of Elizabethan time. They too were discovering a world anew. When a golfer reaches a place afar where there is no course, his first and most natural impulse is to make one. Sir Edgar Vincent, keen player, told me once how he and that most distinguished amateur and ex-champion Mr. J. E. Laidlay, had a considerable hand in the starting of golf in Egypt, where it is now as well established as the Pyramids and Sphinx. Sir Edgar went to Cairo, and with him took his clubs, but on arrival found there was no course whereon to play, and there was Laidlay disappointed in the same way. So they twain obtained shovels and other implements of labour, enlisted the service of native helpers, and went out into the desert, making there the first golf course of Egypt. But theirs was not the distinction of hitting the first golf ball in that ancient land. Long before then a Scottish golfing minister did it. There is no better enthusiast than these ministers, about whom the best stories are told, as of the worthy who was left muttering the Athanasian creed in the lowest depths of hell, being the bunker of that name on the old course at St. Andrews, and the other who felt he would have to give it up because he played so ill and was so much provoked - not give up the game but alas! his ministry. And so the Rev. J. H. Tait, of Aberlady, went for a golfing holiday to Egypt long before the two gallants who did the spade work there, lumbered himself up to the top of the great Pyramid, and then, feeling in his pocket, curiously enough discovered an old golf ball there. To tee it up, to address it with the handle end of his umbrella, and to despatch it earthwards to Egyptian sand with the thwack of an honest east-coast swing, was the labour of no more time than would be needed to recite a verse of Psalms.