Many are the indictments which are brought against Golf: that it is a deplorable waster of time; that it depletes the purse; that it divorces husband and wife; that it delays the dinner-hour, freckles fair feminine faces, upsets domestic arrangements, and unhinges generally the mental balance of its devotees. Yet perhaps to each of such charges Golf can enter a plea. It repays expenditure of time and money with interest in the form of health and good spirits. If it acts the part of co-respondent it is always open to the petitioner to espouse the game. If it keeps men and women away from work and home, at least it keeps them out on the breezy links and dispels for a time the cares of the office or the kitchen. If it tans--well, it tans, and a tanned face needs no paint, and is, moreover, beautiful to look upon. Nevertheless, one indictment there is against which it is not in the power of Golf to enter a plea. It has killed the country walk. "A country walk!" exclaimed a fellow-golfer to me the other day. "I have not taken a country walk since I began to play." There are, I know, who affect to believe that Golf consists of country walks, diversified and embellished by pauses made for the purpose of impelling little round balls into little round holes; that mind and eye are occupied chiefly with the beauties of Nature, and that the impulsion of the insignificant sphere into the insignificant void is, as it were, but a sop to Cerberus, or a cock sacrificed to the Æsculapius of this sporting age. "How greatly," said to me once a fair and innocent stranger to my links--"how greatly this beautiful landscape must enhance the pleasure of your game!" _O sancta simplicitas!_ Far be it from me to explain that as a rule the horrid golfer only drank in the beauties of that landscape when the game was over, and he was, perchance, occupied in performing a similar operation upon the contents of a tumbler at his elbow as he reclined in an arm-chair on the verandah.--And yet, and yet, our links _are_ beautiful, and one and all of us their frequenters know and appreciate to the full their beauty; but _not_, I think, at the moment of "addressing the ball."--No; Golf is Golf; a country walk is quite another thing; and the one, I maintain, has killed the other. II The Essence of a Walk § 2