and their needs, in England at all events, were alike few and simple. The Club was instituted in 1864; therefore it has now passed its jubilee; but I, unhappily, have to look back upon many of those early years as so many periods of wasted opportunity. That same Uncle Fred who had condemned the club of the cannibal, gave me my first true golf club. Years afterwards an anxious mother asked him, "At what age do you think my little boy should begin golf: I want him to be a very good player?" "How old is the boy now?" my uncle asked. "Seven," the mother replied. "Seven!" he repeated sadly. "Oh, then he has lost three years already!" I was given a club long before I was seven, but our house was two long miles from the course, and miles are very long for the short legs of seven. There were the fields, but though it is reported of Queen Mary Stuart that she found agreeable solace in playing at golf in "the fields around Seaton house," I did not find golf exhilarating in the fields around Wellesbourne House. But the atmosphere of golf was about the house. The Golf Club prospered, as golfing prosperity was rated in that day of small things. The extraordinary news went abroad that it was now possible to play the game of Scotland on real links turf in this corner of Devon. Men of renown, such as Mr. George Glennie, Mr. Buskin, and many besides came from the ancient club at Blackheath, and stayed for golf at the hotel recently built at that place which had now received its name from Kingsley's book. Sir Robert Hay and Sir Hope Grant, the former one of the finest amateurs of a past day and the latter more distinguished as a soldier than a golfer, came as guests, for golfing purposes, to my father's house. My two brothers, both in the Army and from twelve to nineteen years older than myself, played a few games when home on leave. I was too young to take any part in a match, but not too young to listen to much talk about the game and to look with profound veneration on its great players. [Illustration: At Pau: the oldest of non-Scottish Golf Clubs. Sir Victor Brooke (driving). Colonel Hegan Kennard.] [Illustration: Captain's Medal of the Royal North Devon Golf Club, showing the old approved way of driving with the right elbow up.] CHAPTER II HOW GOLF IN ENGLAND GREW