And there is golf in China too, six clubs for it. We had no sooner come to the conclusion and officially announced some years ago that Wei-hai-wei was a very desirable resort, than the golf club was duly established there. In these days the building prospector first settles upon his golf course, and advertises it, and then he builds his houses round about; and in the same way it is realised that it is the proper thing when seeking to make a new centre of Europeans abroad to start with a golf course. I have been with men on shipboard who, having golfed on the queer course of Tangier, have then speculated unceasingly in the smoke-room as we sailed along the smooth waters of the West African coast about the kind of golf that would be vouchsafed to them on reaching the Canary Islands. Some time since I had a letter from a highly-placed British official at Chinkiang on the Yangtse River, and he told me how they had just begun to play the game out there on a new course which was covered with crater-like excrescences. These are Chinese graves, and they are said to make most excellent hazards. There are pig-tailed fellows for caddies, and it was carefully ascertained that no Chinese sentiment is injured in the matter. There are golf clubs in all the States of Europe. There are very many in France, and there are more each year, and it is remarkable that the Frenchman is now establishing them for his exclusive use. At Boulogne the Englishman and his friends of France golf together on a course where some of the hazards were the earthworks of Napoleon’s camp--the camp that held the Grand Army that lay in readiness for the invasion of Britain. What irony is here--that the British golfer should play over the Emperor’s camp! The Master-General must himself have walked many times over the lines of our tee shots, and the shadow of the monument that he built to commemorate his invasion of Albion, almost lies across the course from which Albion herself, uninvaded, may be seen. And the Mayor of Boulogne gives prizes to the British golfers who make the best golf on Napoleon’s camp. I come to realise the depth of the meaning of the lines cut into a marble tablet that I saw on the side of a staircase in the Museum at Boulogne one day--“France and England have more good sense than all the world,” and those lines were put on the stone more than sixty years ago.