[The following story, translated by Miss Isabel Bruce from _Le Grand Choleur_ of M. Charles Deulin (_Contes du Roi Gambrinus_), gives a great deal of information about French and Flemish golf. As any reader will see, this ancient game represents a stage of evolution between golf and hockey. The object is to strike a ball, in as few strokes as possible, to a given point; but, after every three strokes, the opponent is allowed to _décholer_, or make one stroke back, or into a hazard. Here the element of hockey comes in. Get rid of this element, let each man hit his own ball, and, in place of striking to a point--say, the cemetery gate--let men “putt” into holes, and the Flemish game becomes golf. It is of great antiquity. Ducange, in his Lexicon of Low Latin, gives _Choulla_, French _choule_ = “Globulus ligneus qui clava propellitur”--a wooden ball struck with a club. The head of the club was of iron (cf. _crossare_). This is borne out by a miniature in a missal of 1504, which represents peasants playing _choule_ with clubs very like niblicks. Ducange quotes various MS. references of 1353, 1357, and other dates older by a century than our earliest Scotch references to golf. At present the game is played in Belgium with a strangely-shaped lofting-iron and a ball of beechwood. M. Zola (_Germinal_, p. 310) represents his miners playing _chole_, or _choulle_, and says that they hit drives of more than 500 yards. Experiments made at Wimbledon with a Belgian club sent over by M. Charles Michel suggest that M. Zola has over-estimated the distance. But M. Zola and M. Deulin agree in making the players _run_ after the ball. M. Henri Gaidoz adds that a similar game, called _soule_, is played in various departments of France. He refers to Laisnel de la Salle. The name _chole_ may be connected with German _Kolbe_, and _golf_ may be the form which this word would assume in a Celtic language. All this makes golf very old; but the question arises, Are the “holes” to which golfers play of Scotch or of Dutch origin? There are several old Flemish pictures of golf; do any of them show players in the act of “holing out”? There is said to be such a picture at Neuchâtel. A. LANG.] I Once upon a time there lived at the hamlet of Coq, near Condé-sur-l’Escaut, a wheelwright called Roger. He was a good fellow, untiring both at his sport and at his toil, and as skilful in lofting a ball with a stroke of his club as in putting together a cartwheel. Every one knows that the game of golf consists in driving towards a given point a ball of cherrywood with a club which has for head a sort of little iron shoe without a heel.