'So eagerly with horrid voice the Fiend Cries "Fore!" as he o'er the far bunker drives The errant ball; it with the setting sun Dropp'd from the zenith like a falling star, Alas! untruly urged, it lies in Hell.' Then I muse over all the golf-courses that I have played on or seen, from St. Andrews to an improvised one above Astor amongst the stately pines on the Himalayan mountains, when the snow peaks and the glaciers, glistening in the marvellous sunshine, play hide-and-seek with the white fleecy clouds that drift over their summits. Those wonderful mountains! what magnificent outlines, what grandeur, what mystery, what!... Stop! can I be growing sentimental? It must have been the dinner that has produced this particular physiological sensation. However, the sensation is passing, and my thoughts have flown back naturally to the subject of dinners. Yes, many dinners--what a subject!--glorious, unapproachable, exhaustless dinners! I could write pages, volumes, in praise of dinners; but not for the vulgar, not for the uninitiated--that surely were sacrilege. Dinners that with subtle and insinuating address came and went, leaving behind them fascinating and precious memories, even though 'good digestion did not wait on appetite.' Dinners, too, eaten under the stars. Yes, now I think of it, that _was_ a dinner! when four of us ate a whole sheep, after two weary days and nights spent starving on the icy slopes of Nanga Parbat. Mountaineering, truly thou art a marvellous and goodly provoker of hunger! Those mortals who may be in search of sensations--big, boisterous, blustering sensations not to be denied--should sacrifice often on thy altars, O Goddess of the Hills! In the mountains, however, these sensations, these inspired ecstasies of mind and body, may be pushed sometimes rather far; then the recoil comes, and with it contrast, which however is often agreeable. But these memories of unpleasant Alpine half-hours grow faint as one sits in a satisfying arm-chair--they are easily discounted in a process of mental dissipation, by which one cheats oneself; and finally, it is easy to believe that there is no sport like mountaineering. Of course this conclusion is fallacious--conclusions sometimes are. Again my thoughts are interrupted. Outside in the cold, the rain, and the darkness some poor wretch is making night hideous by attempting to sing-- 'There is a 'appy land, for for awye.' Most true! most philosophical! The Islands of the Blest usually are some distance away. We have been told by the poet that neither are they to be attained by omnibuses, nor to be approached by 'A ram-you-damn-you liner with a brace of bucking screws.'