hit there, and the ground falls away towards the edges of the greens. Now after this very exacting golf we may turn to something rather easier and more straightforward and take our tickets for New Romney in order to play at Littlestone. New Romney is a pleasant, quiet, sleepy spot with a fine old church, once a thriving seaport, now left high and dry a mile or more inland. =Littlestone= consists of a long and somewhat unprepossessing terrace of grey lodging-houses, arranged with mathematical precision along one side of a straight, flat road. On the other side of the road is the sea, and this is the saving clause at Littlestone. It is not beautiful--very far from it--but we are right on the edge of the sea; we snuff it fresh and salt in our nostrils, and can almost believe that one wave, just a little larger than the others, could overwhelm the road and the terrace and the very links themselves. Yet, though we are so near the sea, and there is as much sea and sand as anyone could wish, the course itself has just the suspicion of an inland look. The fairway is so beautifully flat and shaven and runs so straight and so precisely between two lines of thick tufty grass, which might at certain seasons be irreverently called hay. The soil itself at the first two and last two holes is not altogether above the accusation of being clay; it can be rather muddy in winter and terribly hard in summer. No; I cannot get it out of my head that Littlestone does look like one of the trimmest and smoothest of inland courses picked up by some benevolent magician and dumped down again by the sea. [Illustration: LITTLESTONE _The carry from the seventeenth tee_] However, we have all been taught that we ought not to judge by appearances, and that people cannot help their looks. Bearing this in mind, we shall find that the appearance of Littlestone does not do it justice, and that there is in fact very good golf to be played there. Moreover, it is much better golf than it used to be, since with Braid, as the villain-in-chief, and Mr. F. W. Maude, as second conspirator, a vast number of pot-bunkers have been scattered about the course, and Littlestone is no longer the paradise it once was for the erratic slogger. If the course has a weakness now it is no longer a lack of bunkers; rather is it something, that no human ingenuity can alter, a uniform flatness of stances and lies. Shot after shot has to be played from a perfectly smooth, flat plain; there are none of the little hills and hummocks that add so much to the fascination and the difficulty of Deal and Rye.