In the days of the gutty it was most emphatically a driver's course, since nobody could get over the ground without exceptionally honest hitting. Even now, when the pampering Haskell has noticeably reduced its terrors, it is still a driver's course, in the sense that it is one on which one derives the maximum of sensual pleasure from opening one's shoulders for a wooden club shot. Moreover, long driving does pay--for the matter of that, it pays anywhere--because there are several second shots which are enormously more formidable, when they have to be played with something like a full shot. There is, for instance, the ninth--a hole of which men used to speak with the same reverential awe with which they alluded to the 'Maiden' at Sandwich. Certainly that bunker in front of the green is sufficiently desperate, and to be compelled to approach the hole with a brassey may well inspire fear, but a good drive on a calm day should leave us little more than a firm half-iron shot to play, and then we can afford to treat the bunker almost with contempt. The same remark applies in a measure to the fourth hole, and likewise to the fourteenth. There are beautifully guarded greens and alarming bunkers, and just the extra yards gained by a good drive make a world of difference in easiness of the approach. Few things are more terrifying than the first hole at Brancaster on a cold, raw, windy morning, when our wrists are stiff and our beautiful steely-shafted driver feels like a poker. There is a bunker--really a very big, deep bunker--right in front of our noses, and stretching away for a hundred yards or so, and the early morning 'founder' that would send the ball ricochetting away for miles at the first hole at Hoylake or St. Andrews brings us to immediate grief. There is nothing very thrilling about the second shot, and the next two holes, although good enough, must remain unsung. At the fourth, however, we come to a thoroughly entertaining hole; the second shot has to be played from a plain, over a hill, and on to something that one might call a plateau, were it not that such a term hardly does justice to the curliness of the green.