It gives him hope and thought. Change always induces reflection, and here we have the change of the seasons, and a little of all of them in a short space of time. An old proverb says that “April borrows three days of March, and they are ill.” But as often she borrows several days of May, and they are warm and sunny, and so hereabouts we have the winds, and the showers, and the sunshine; and who can walk on the links to-day and not think something of what the rain has been doing, and what the winds have done, and what the sun is doing and is going to do? Here they are all together, great master wonders to be thought much of. They are much to all men; everything to the sportsman and the folks of the outdoor life. The sun and the rain are in such daily association in the days of the sportsman’s spring, and more than ever is he inclined at this season to give some passing thought to the phenomena of Nature, that one comes to wonder sometimes whether he reflects as he might do on the eternal exchange, how the drops of water that the sun takes up from the fields over which he tramps, the golf links that he plays over, the rivers and streams that he fishes, are every one of them placed back again, perhaps not on the same fields or in the same rivers, but in some field or river somewhere. The bare fact is one of elementary knowledge; but its extensions are not so much so, and are interesting to think upon. If the sun always gave back to each particular sportsman the rain that it had taken away from his own playing fields and rivers, how dull would his life be from the knowledge of what the weather and the seasons had certainly for him in the future? With the caprice of the clouds and the wind there is no such even and regular return of that which was taken away. The golf links of the Lothians may be kept rained upon and moist so that the turf is the most perfect, all with the rain that was sucked up from the courses of the south coast of England, round about Deal and Sandwich and Rye; and surely when the links in the south are parched, and when they are green and moist in the north, we must think of that. V