When I went up to Oxford in the Christmas term of 1878 I found that Royal and ancient city sunk in an ignorance that is scarcely credible in regard to all connected with the royal and ancient game. I do not mean to say that golf was altogether unknown. There was already a University Golf Club in being, which I quickly joined, and we used to play on the cricket fields in Cowley Marsh. That, of course, implied that there was no golf in the summer term when the marsh was occupied by the cricket. But the golfers were very few. Mr. "Pat" Henderson (now Wright-Henderson) the Wadham don, was one of the most moving spirits. Then there was the Principal of Hertford, there was Jim Lockhart, a fellow of Hertford and a lecturer at my own college of Corpus, and Lodge, then history lecturer at Brasenose. These and a very few others of the dons used to play, and of undergraduates the ones I best remember were Cathcart of Christ Church, son of old Mr. "Bob" Cathcart the Fifeshire laird and for very many a year Convener of the Green Committee of the Royal and Ancient Club, Baynes of Oriel, now a bishop, Pearson of Balliol and several more. But their doings were a black mystery to most of the undergraduates, and either the game was not heard of by them or it was believed that the golfers practised some unholy rite in the not very cheerful surroundings of Cowley Marsh. I had known Jim Lockhart before I went up, for he was one of the Westward Ho! lot and a cousin besides of Jack Lamont, to whom I owed very much of my golfing education; so he saw to my election to the Club as soon as I came to Oxford. Considering the nature of the ground on Cowley Marsh, how singularly well it was suited by its dreary name, and that the only hazards were the cricket pavilions and the occasional hedges, it is wonderful how much real interest might be got out of the golf there. Whatever else a cricket pavilion may be as a golfing hazard, it is an uncompromising one. You have to be beyond or to the side of it. If hard up against it, even the strongest driver cannot send the ball through it; and it gives occasion for pulling and slicing round it which are good fun and good practice. Jim Lockhart was a friend of my tutor at Corpus whom we irreverently called "Billy Little," and it was on the occasion of his taking his fellow don up to Cowley to be introduced to golf that Little delivered himself of the immortal definition of the game as "putting little balls into little holes with instruments very ill-adapted to the purpose." In later years I have heard this brilliant definition attributed to Jowett. It is thus that sayers of good things attract to themselves, magnet-like, and increase their credit, with many good things said by others.