At such times he will be kind to her and will not chide her for her weaknesses. He will humour her good-naturedly. The sixteenth may be a better hole on another course, but do not say so now. Think how rich did that sixteenth here seem in those far-off days when the teething to the clubs was first being done. What terrors had its bunkers! What a big, lusty, and not to say a brutal one, did it seem then; but now to the time-worn golfer, if the truth must be whispered for once to himself, that old sixteenth seems something of a milksop, and can be played in ten different ways with a half-hearted drive and something of a mashie or iron. How happy we were despite the constant troubles in those olden days, when we were always with our mother links, and knew no others! The old men of golf came and told us of the great courses that they had encountered in their travels--such wonderful holes, such amazing bunkers, such marvellous putting greens! These travellers’ tales were pleasant to listen to, and they fired the imagination; but after all we returned with some content to our mother links. And then, what golfer does not remember the day, particularly if he was then no longer a child in years, when he went away for the first time from that course and paid a visit to one of those celebrated of which so much is written in the books and on which so many fine matches and championships are played? This is always an epoch, and a stirring one in every golfing life. There are many wild emotions in the man when for the first time he takes his club to play a shot on this foreign course of so much renown. If he is an intelligent man, and an impartial one, he sees the merit and the glory, and he admits it without reservation. He feels that now he has gone out into the great world, and that there are more wonders in it than even his utmost fancy had suspected. He is like the Queen of Sheba who went to see the magnificence of Solomon, confessing then that it was a true report that she had heard in her own land, though she believed not until her eyes had seen, when she knew that the half had not been told her. Out alone on this wonderful course the feeling of loneliness and helplessness will come upon this immature player. Truly the half had not been told to him, and in mortal agony in some “Hell” or other, or in a Devil’s Kitchen or a Punchbowl, or it may be in the sandy wastes of a Sahara or in a crevasse on the heights of the Alps or the Himalayas--how, then, will he be reminded of the tender indulgences of his mother links, of her constant kindness, and of the way in which she humoured his youthful caprice and smiled patiently upon him when he was fretful! Perhaps she was too indulgent, and the maternal laxness did something towards the spoiling of the child for the manhood that was to follow. But no matter, let the golfer always be kind and well disposed to his mother links. THE SUNNY SEASON I