Sealand, shoreland, it seems, makes the ideal golf course, the soil growing with short crisp grass that makes a springy and slippery turf, and makes a keen game; the inlander, of course, and the American inlander, may not understand that golf can never quite be golf, certainly never be the true Scottish rite, unless it is played near the sea, with the tang of the sea and of golf entering into one's blood—and, preferably at St. Andrews.
At St. Andrews golf is a business, a sublimated business; or better, an education. Degrees are taken in it quite as high and requiring as thorough a training as at the University. It is to St. Andrews that the good golfer goes when he dies. And he aspires to go there before.
Or, rather at St. Andrews golf is a religion. Half the stories told of golf are, as might be expected of a game which came to its flowering in Scotland, religious, or irreligious. And one of the best of them is told in Stewart Dick's book on "The Forth." A Scots minister was playing and playing rather badly, and expressing himself in words if not in strokes. (Only those of you who have read "Sentimental Tommy" will understand that unconsciously I have played on the word "stroke!") The minister exclaimed bitterly as he emerged from his unholy battle with the bunker—is Bunker Hill, perhaps a hazard in golf?—"Ah maun gie it up! ah maun gie it up!" "What!" cried his partner alarmed, "gie up gowf?" "Naw, naw," returned the minister, "gie up the meenistry."
Perhaps to amend again, golf at St. Andrews is life. And in their death they are not divided. The graveyard near the Abbey, with stones hoary from the sixteenth century, is renowned to-day because it contains the graves of good golfers, Allan Robertson, old Tom Morris, and young Tom Morris, the greatest golfer since Paterson, dead at the pathetic age of 24; after that comes a man's best golfing years, that is, for his pleasure. Young Tom's grave is marked by an elaborate monument with an inscription that befits a king.
CHAPTER VI
TO THE NORTH
ne leaves Edinburgh for the North—the haunted North—as in a royal progress. The train moves out of the Waverley station, and through the Gardens, under the very shadow of Castle Rock.
And it moves through the scant few miles of country, richly cultivated, suburban fairly, yet there are level wheatlands, and country cottages and orchards; it is southern, English, these few miles down to the Forth.