So it is hope and hope all the way through the golfer’s life, and it is the most joyous, the most uplifting of all the instincts, and the most intensely human, and that which is given to man alone. It is because golf strikes always this chord in his nature that it makes the strong appeal to him. There is no other game or sport that permits him to hope through failure in the same way, that leads him on, coaxes him, cajoles him, even fools him. And this drama of the emotions of the individual is played always in the most perfect setting for such a simple human play--the sea and green fields and plain earth, and the simplest tools to move a little white ball, not along marked lines or within narrow limits or in protected arenas, but anywhere along that green grass, over the hills and through the valleys and across the streams and rushing rivers, while the wind blows now this way and then that, and the rain pours. All the time the golfer pursues the little ball, alone with plain nature and his human adversary. Here he is released from all the conventionalities of mind that hold him in his other doings in this complicated civilisation. The primitive instincts are in command; they have the fields and the sea for harmony in the scene, and the golfer is away from all the intricacies of the twentieth century, and is the simple man and the hopeful man. That is a fair creed concerning the command of golf, and we may reject the theory that indomitable, persevering mankind finds the fascination of the game merely in the failures and irritations that it brings and in the desire to overcome them. The activity of that instinct of hope is the mystic charm, and surely it is to the credit of a game that it should teach the man to look forward with courage and cheerfulness, and to be always something of an optimist, and the more of it the better for his game. These things lead to the making of a good man as well as a good golfer. II Men of other races, whose skins are not white, are afoot with this game. Black men are playing; yellow men are becoming expert; red men have achieved great skill. A few years since a golfer traveller found his way to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, and he saw the wild Red Indian at golf, and thought that it suited him better than his old game of lacrosse. Spotted Horse drove off along the prairie--a plain prairie with only a few shrubs about--and he followed and played the ball for a couple of miles to the turn, and then played it back. There were no holes; the game was to play the course in the fewest strokes. Here, indeed, is the primitive golf. Some of the Indians are said to have made fine drives--as good as the best that white men do--and this was all the more remarkable inasmuch as it is the Red Indians’ pretty custom to yell and howl in a frightful chorus while one of their number is addressing the ball preparatory to making his stroke. So it does not seem easy to put the red men off.