On the other hand, there are times when he is sadly mindful of failure, and he is much too serious a golfer ever to forget the most evil things he has done. One time we saw him playing in a foursome--his favourite form of golf--with Mr. Eric Hambro as his partner, and after foozling his approach in a deplorable manner, he called out wearily to his partner, “Do you know, Hambro, I once did that kind of thing for a whole fortnight!” It must have been the blackest fortnight in the right honourable gentleman’s career. He is something of a philosopher on the links, and when he makes a bad stroke he sometimes explains how it came about to those who are near him, or to the course and the sky, if he is momentarily isolated. This, indeed, is one of the very few respects in which the Prime Minister falls from what we may regard as the standard of the ideal golfer. He is inclined to reach too hastily at a conclusion, and some say to speak too much. Some masters have held that the perfect golfer plays in absolute silence, and Mr. Balfour is not an absolutely silent golfer, though in his case he is none the less earnest. It has been stated that never on the links does he make use of any other ejaculation than “Dear me!” but this statement, besides being untrue, is absurd, and is not complimentary to him as a golfer. Let him miss a shot or do anything which he ought not to have done, and the human man comes out above the statesman, though, of course, nobody has ever heard Mr. Balfour commit himself to any unbecoming remark. But in the production of effect from the minor expletives he is most skilful. “Botheration!” is the commonest of his ejaculations, and as he says it whilst witnessing the descent of his little white ball into a yawning bunker, one, as an old golfer, sometimes realises that the most satisfactory results in this respect are not always produced from the use of the strongest materials. “Oh, this is indeed shocking!” is another favourite form of expression, which, as he says it, speaks a volume upon the agony of the mind. For the rest he is just a good, determined golfer, who is a first-class sportsman, never giving any quarter on the links, and never expecting any. You never see Mr. Balfour pick up his ball whilst there is still the remotest chance left of his dividing the hole with his opponent, and he would reject with scorn, like every other true golfer, the suggestion that he takes his golf for the sake of the exercise only. It is because he is thus keen that other and better players find it a constant pleasure to match themselves against him, or to become his partner in a foursome. They know then that they are out for golf.