At the end of our round we return to the club-house, flushed with healthy exercise, with a full and particular knowledge of the bunkers of the course, but with the proud consciousness that we have not been passed, and that we have faithfully replaced every divot. CHAPTER X. ST. ANDREWS, FIFE AND FORFARSHIRE. Really to know the links of St. Andrews can never be given to the casual visitor. It is not perhaps necessary to be one of those old gentlemen who tell us at all too frequent intervals that golf was golf in their young days, that we of to-day are solely occupied in the pursuit of pots and pans, and that Sir Robert Hay, with his tall hat and his graduated series of spoons, would have beaten us, one and all, into the middle of the ensuing week. Such a degree of senile decay is fortunately not essential, but one ought to have known and loved and played over the links for a long while; and I can lay no claims to such knowledge as that. I can speak only as an occasional pilgrim, whose pilgrimages, though always reverent, have been far too few. I do not know by instinct whether or not my ball is trapped in 'Sutherland'; I only just know the difference between 'Strath' and the 'Shelly' bunker; I could not keep up my end in an argument as to the proper line to take at the second hole--I am, in short, a very ignorant person, who means thoroughly well. There are those who do not like the golf at =St. Andrews=, and they will no doubt deny any charm to the links themselves, but there must surely be none who will deny a charm to the place as a whole. It may be immoral, but it is delightful to see a whole town given up to golf; to see the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker shouldering his clubs as soon as his day's work is done and making a dash for the links. There he and his fellows will very possibly get in our way, or we shall get in theirs; we shall often curse the crowd, and wish whole-heartedly that golf was less popular in St. Andrews. Nevertheless it is that utter self-abandonment to golf that gives the place its attractiveness. What a pleasant spectacle is that home green, fenced in on two sides by a railing, upon which lean various critical observers; and there is the club-house on one side, and the club-maker's shop and the hotels on the other, all full of people who are looking at the putting, and all talking of putts that they themselves holed or missed on that or on some other green. I once met, staying in a hotel at St. Andrews, a gentleman who did not play golf. That is in itself remarkable, but more wonderful still, he joined so rationally, if unobtrusively, in the perpetual golfing conversation that his black secret was never discovered. I do not know if he enjoyed himself, but his achievement was at least a notable one. [Illustration: ST. ANDREWS _The town in the distance_]