After the third we are confronted with the two long holes, and the piling up of our score begins. It is now some time since I played them, and they are, besides, too long to describe in detail. I have a vision of reaching, after several shots on the flat, a deep hollow on the left, and spending some further time in hacking the ball along its hard and inhospitable turf, finally to emerge on to the flat again and reach the green in a score verging upon double figures. The fifth hole may be described as the same, only not quite so much so, and the round ends with two holes of a somewhat milder character, but neither of them in the least easy. Then off we go over the pit again for our second round, and there is yet another one left to play. To play three rounds over Blackheath on a cold, blustery winter's day is a man's task. It is sad that there was no contemporary chronicler to do for the old golfers of Blackheath what John Nyren of immortal memory did for the cricketers of Hambledon; but the club has not lacked its _vates sacer_, and in Mr. W. E. Hughes' book is a store of pleasant and interesting history. Most golfers know the delightful picture of the gentleman in a red coat with blue facings, gold epaulettes and knee-breeches, who stands in so dignified an attitude, his club over his shoulder. It is dedicated to the "Society of Golfers at Blackheath" with "just respect" by their "most humble servant Lemuel Francis Abbott," and, like the artist, we too salute with just respect a venerable and illustrious society. [Illustration: WIMBLEDON _On the common_] The Royal Wimbledon Club was founded some two hundred and sixty years after the Royal Blackheath, and yet golf is still so young a game in England that the two appear of almost equally hoary antiquity. There is an old-fashioned air about the golf at =Wimbledon=--an atmosphere of red coats and friendly foursomes made up at luncheon, which is exceedingly pleasant--nor is the actual golf on Wimbledon Common by any means to be despised. It has at least one supreme virtue--that of naturalness; those great clumps of gorse and the deep ravines where the birches grow were put there by the hand of Nature herself, who, if she be not so cunning, is at any rate infinitely more artistic than any golfing architect. When Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote the Badminton volume he wrote of the golf at Wimbledon that it was almost "an insult to the game to dignify it by the name of golf," adding that he would rather call it a "wonderful substitute for the game within so short a distance of Charing Cross." It is perhaps a just criticism, but what would Mr. Hutchinson say of the hundred 'mud-heaps' that have sprung up within a short distance of Charing Cross since these days? He would probably keep silence lest he should fall a victim to the law of libel and an unsympathetic jury.