big machine that is working in the streets, largely as the result of the awakening of popular sympathies by such means as games. All the congruous elements of different countries far apart are being attracted to each other, as if magnetically, by such influences as the motor car, the bicycle, cricket, football, and, far from least, by golf: and the potency of these charms lies in the fact that when they are set to work, men’s minds are relaxed from the general materialistic sternness of their business times, and the humanity in them is asserting itself. Now, all those good men who take the cosmopolitan view of human happiness must see that among all games with powers like this there can be none of greater adaptability and general use and efficiency than golf. It may be, and is used by people of every colour, race, creed, and temperament, in every climate and all the year round. No recreation, apart from the simplest contests of the river and field, has ever been so universal since the world began, with the single exception of chess. And wherever and whenever it is played it extends its benign influence towards the promotion of fast friendship among the players. There is no freemasonry like the freemasonry of golf. To its temples in every land are always welcomed the faithful and earnest craftsman from where’er he came, and he is passed on the signs of the bag and the stance and the little pimpled ball. For it is one of the articles of belief that no man can be a good and enthusiastic golfer of experience and at the same time a thoroughly bad fellow, for at the outset of his career the bad fellow would never be happy in his game; others would not help to make him so, and he would either be stung by the consciousness of his own defects and reform, or he would slip away into the small silent pitiable minority who leave the links one day never to return. Thus has our happy game of golf wound a bright cordon round the world, and so does she play her part in the great evolution of general contentment. IV “In spring,” we have been told in the _Georgics_, “heat returns to the bones.” And the blood runs eagerly through the golfer’s veins. April and May are the months of hope and of exultation. There is joy in the present, in the showers and the sunshine, and a great joy in prospect in the future. Each true golfer is a lover of Nature, and something of a philosopher, and at this season, as at no other, when he gets wakened on a bright morning and sees the country clean and fresh, and coming again into bright green and many colours, while the birds sing at _allegro_ and _fortissimo_, a deep pleasure fills his being, the pleasure of spring. He is alive, alive; and it is fine to be alive. Summer is glorious, autumn is beautiful, cold winter has charms for those who have proper feeling for it; but spring, the Germinal, is surely Nature’s favourite season, and the golfer must always love his spring.