Let us take a look at Lambton. From my room in Toronto I rang up Lyon, whom I had met several times in England, and asked him to guess the name of the caller; he gave the name without hesitation, though he had no more reason to know that I was in Canada than in Tasmania. So quite in a matter-of-fact way we met on the following day in a Grand Trunk car starting from the Union station, and inquired of each other as to the ball that each was using. The journey from Toronto is one of only a few minutes, and soon after the stopping of the train the feet may tread on some of the nicest golfing turf that is to be found out of England, and the reason is palpable, for here are the big bunkers of the proper kind made of real yellow sand, which is natural to the place. When they need new sand bunkers at Lambton they cut them open and there they are. So sandy is the place that sometimes they have a difficulty in making the grass grow properly, and one result of these favourable natural conditions is that the course is better bunkered than most others on the American continent. Tee shots and approaches must be played well, and at the very first green the hint is given that the short game must be well done. The fourth hole is one of the jewels of Canadian golf. The teeing ground is on a height, and below it is a series of descending plateaux like giants' steps until the level is reached. When he has made a very passable drive the player is called upon with a very proper second to carry the Black Creek which guards the green and is coiled like a snake about it. The shot must have fair length and it must be very straight as well. Normally the hole is 365 yards long, so that in mere distance it is not a terrible thing, but when medals are being played for its length is stretched out to the four hundred yards. At the sixth the stream which they call Humber comes into the reckoning. It is a nice two-shot hole, and the seventh is an excellent short one with the inky creek here again. With the stump of a tree protruding from the water, large leafy growths upon the surface, a general sleepiness and the green in a sequestered corner beneath a shading hill, this is quite one of the most attractive of water holes. It is a strong hole, too, with fear about it, for the carry is one of 165 yards, and I was told that when Miss Rhona Adair, now Mrs. Cuthell, several times lady champion, was in these parts some years ago she twice did the carry and a third time her ball skimmed the water and reached the green after all. This was good work for a lady, especially as I rather fancy she must have been using the gutty ball at that time.
The greens at Lambton are generally excellent, and they have adopted a means for keeping them in good order which, though it has been tried in other parts of America, has not to my knowledge been employed elsewhere. I have heard objections raised against it, but the results at Lambton are uncommonly good. Nearly all the greens here are kept properly moistened by a process of sub-irrigation, and are never watered on the surface. Below the green there is a deep bed of cinders, and over this and about eighteen inches from the grass there is a network of water pipes made of a hard porous clay, "weeping clay" they call it, the entire under-surface of the greens being covered with them. At the corner of each green there is a feed pipe connecting with this network, and once a day the water supply is laid on to it and all the pipes under the green are loaded. The heat of the sun then slowly draws the water through the porous pipes and up to the surface, and the results of the process are uniformly good. Lambton is a fine institution altogether. There is a short ladies' course as well as the other, a fine toboggan chute down the slope in front of the club-house, and the latter is in all respects an admirable place, well fitted with baths, bedrooms, and public apartments that are elegant and comfortable. This place has something to do with Toronto life of to-day. There are seven hundred members, and now it costs a new one the equivalent of six hundred dollars in his first year. He has to get a hundred-dollar share in the club to begin with, and these are at such a premium that he has to pay five hundred dollars for one. On one of the walls of the club-house is a life-size portrait of the champion of the country in a characteristic attitude with his brassey under his arm.
§
The case of Toronto is very interesting. The club, which takes the name of the city and is one of the oldest in the country, was started in 1876, and completely reorganised some eighteen years later. The pretty little course that it had until lately was on the outskirts of the city, with an old and quaint farm-house, which had from time to time been enlarged, for a club-house. As to the course, it was quite nice. It was very undulating, ravines, gullies, and belts of trees being prominent everywhere. The turf was good, and some of the holes were excellent. In the club-house there were fine trophies and some old prints, and a plan of the old course at St. Andrews, with a photograph of old Tom Morris attached to it, signed "From Tom Morris, to the members of the Toronto Golf Club, 1896." Everything belonging to this old course was sweetly mellow, and one's visit there made a pleasant experience. But it met a fate which has been common enough near London but rare elsewhere. The speed of Toronto's expansion brought it about, and, owing to the encroachments of the builders, the club had to move. I was there at the parting, and it was a sad one. Its members, however, being a very wealthy and enthusiastic body of gentlemen, determined to make for themselves a new home which should be as good as anything that could be done, and their ambition was fulfilled. Etobicoke! It is one of the wonders of the west, and I was the first wandering British player to set his foot upon it.
Etobicoke is several miles out from Toronto, and here with the money that the club obtained from the sale of the old course they bought 270 acres of what was virgin land, being for the most part covered with trees at the time. This they had cleared, ploughed, and properly prepared, and Mr. Harry Colt came out from England to lay out the course. His finished work, as I have seen it, must rank as one of his masterpieces. As on so many of the Colt courses there is something of a Sunningdale look about the holes, and nearly all are extremely good. A very fine short one is the fourth and one with which the architect himself was much in love when he had completed the design from the natural materials that were at his hand; and the tenth is a wonder of its kind, the hindmost tee being on a hilltop from which a glorious view of the course is to be had, with Lake Ontario beyond it, while some way lower down the slope are second and third tees, making the distance shorter. The soil is sandy, the turf is good, and the course must be considered to rank as first class absolutely. Mr. W. A. Langton, who went over it with me, said he believed they had come into possession of what would be the finest golf course in America when it has matured, and his judgment may be right.
Many parts of the world were laid under tribute for the making of this course at Etobicoke where the club is still called by the good old simple name, the Toronto Golf Club. It was designed, as I have said, by an English architect, and in order to give a grass to the course that would stand the rigours of the climate better than the ordinary grasses with which courses in North America are generally sown, seeds were obtained from Finland. Then nearly all the rough work of construction was done by Bulgarians and Roumanians, these immigrants being splendid for work of this kind. They were paid at the rate of about seven shillings a day, and they lived in huts which they made on the ground and saved the greater part of the money that they earned. A little over £16,000 or 80,000 dollars were paid for the land, and about the same amount was spent on its preparation and completion as a course; while £20,000 or 100,000 dollars were spent on the building and equipment of a splendid club-house, embracing the utmost comfort and convenience, with about fifty bedrooms. This is a members' club, and the club has all the members and money that it needs, and it is not a speculative enterprise in any way whatever. But British golfers must surely pause with wonder when they hear of a place like Toronto spending £50,000 on a new golf course! Such is the enthusiasm of the Canadian for the game, that while this enterprise was afoot a six-holes course was being constructed alongside it, at a cost of £10,000, for a gentleman who intended to build a house near by to which he might ask his friends.
§
One pleasant day when staying at Montreal I went out to Dixie, a few stations along the Grand Trunk line, where there is the course of the Royal Montreal Club, to be regarded now as the oldest properly established club in the Dominion. This one alone has that title of Royal which Queen Victoria gave it permission to use in 1884. In its early days the course was in Mount Royal Park, overlooking Montreal. Out here at Dixie a certain flavour of the old spirit and good strong sporting simplicity of the game are tasted. The course is somewhat flat and parky, and big banks of bunkers stretch across the fairway, making the general style of the architecture very much of the Victorian, but the undulations and unevennesses of the banks and hollows are redeeming features. Some of the holes are good and the putting greens are excellent, but generally the course suffers from the absence of testing second shots. There is a magnificent view up the river from the seventh tee. A house agent might honestly declare that the club-house is commodious and comfortable. It was made before it was the fashion to erect palaces on golf courses, and sheet-iron bulks largely in its composition; yet it is cosy enough inside, and contains many relics of peculiar interest. In a glass case there are some ancient clubs with which members played in the early days, and a leather belt for which they competed, the names of the winners being written on the inside.
There are many other courses in Montreal and round about it. There is the Beaconsfield Club with its place situated some way up the river, reached by the G. T. R. at Point Claire. The part of Fletcher's Fields in Mount Royal Park, on which the Royal Montreal Club first played, is now in the occupation of the Metropolitan Club, and is only about five minutes' ride by car from the centre of the city. On the eastern slope of Mount Royal is the course of the Outremont Club, which, at the time of my visit, was about to go forward to a new and great enterprise; while on a plateau at the western end of Mount Royal are the nine holes of the West Mount Club, most charmingly situated, with fine views of the city and the river.
At Ottawa there is a course which ranks high among the very best on the continent. It is different in character from that at Dixie, for here there are ravines and gullies, and the land is strongly undulating everywhere. The bunkers and other hazards are natural, the putting greens are smooth, and the subsoil is of sandy loam. It is on the other side of the Ottawa River, beyond Hull, and owing to its being exposed to a broad reach of the stream it is seldom that there is not much wind blowing across it. And there are courses all the way from east to west of this wonderful, blossoming Canada. We find that wherever we wander in the Dominion we are not much distant from a golf club. Even when on a day I sailed across Lake Ontario and made the Gorge Valley trip to the Niagara Falls there was golf near by had it been wanted. Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, round and about the Rockies, and up them too—everywhere the game is played. I was told that when the course at St. John, New Brunswick, was started in 1897, Mr. H. H. Hansard, who made the opening stroke, holed from the tee in one. Holes in one have been done in many curious circumstances, but surely this is one of the most interesting of all. Compare the excellent beginning of St. John with what happened the other day when a new course was being started here at home. I am sorry to say that the municipal dignitary upon whom the chief responsibility was cast missed the ball the first time, and also the second, but contrived to move it from the tee at the third attempt.