However unpleasant this foray might be for the Scottish golfer, it presented certain compensating features to the Scottish railways and hotel-proprietors. Of remote villages, which had formerly figured in the traffic returns as occasional yielders of a truck-load of fish, there now appeared highly-tinted pictures, with the Company's name at the top and a list of trains at the bottom. The hotel proprietors, on their part, quickly realising that to the average Englishman a golf-course consists of any tract of land in Scotland plentifully endowed with rabbit-holes, hastily staked out a claim on the nearest collection of sand-hills, and advertised to all and sundry that visitors to their hotel would be permitted, for a consideration, to play golf over the celebrated links of so-and-so, "adjoining the hotel." Port Allan was one of the places which benefited by reason of the boom. The nearest railway station was seven miles away, but the Company quickly remedied that defect, and advertised through bookings from King's Cross. A special time-table was published, decorated at the top with a coloured view of the Links of Eric, in the foreground of which a golf-match was in progress between a gentleman in a sky-blue Norfolk suit and a red cap, and a lady in a red dress and a sky-blue hat. The lady was depicted in the act of driving off from the tee (with a blue putter); while the gentleman, rather ungallantly, had gone forward a few yards, and was engaged in playing out of the first bunker (with a red brassie). The inhabitants of Port Allan soon realised that to play golf over their own links in summer was out of the question. They accordingly accepted the situation, and, relegating their own golfing efforts to the autumn, turned to the equally congenial task of spoiling the Egyptians. Elderly seafaring men, who had hitherto extracted a precarious livelihood from the grudging ocean, abandoned their nets and took to carrying clubs, the fee of eighteenpence per round which they were permitted to charge being inclusive of a vast amount of caustic criticism, and priceless, if unintelligible, advice.