My pretty niece Cicely insisted on my presence at her wedding to her Brigadier; and I journeyed down to Kent, on a piping August day, in the company of crowds of Irish hoppers bound for the same county. The marriage was from the Cranbrooks' nice place, Hemsted, in the very heart of the Garden of England, a big Victorian house full of the first Earl's[5] memorials of Queen Victoria, Beaconsfield, {194} and the other great Tory statesmen of his day. Lady Jane Gathorne-Hardy did the honours for the large house-party, as her parents were away taking a "cure" somewhere; and the day after the pretty wedding in the pretty parish church (the vicar, an old Magdalen man, gave a very good address), our kind hostess escorted the whole party up to town and entertained them to luncheon and a frivolous afternoon at the "Follies." I left London the same night for Scotland, and met at Beaufort, where I stayed _en route_, for our Highland abbey, Lovat's youthful bride-elect--as tall, and I am sure as good, as the lady in _The Green Carnation_,[6] and already an accepted and affectionate member of the large and merry family of Frasers and Maxwells. I sailed down our familiar canal to Fort Augustus on a marvellously still and bright autumn afternoon; and as we slid alongside the Fort Augustus quay and looked back on the panorama of azure lake and purple hills, a friend and I agreed (as he colloquially put it) that it "licked the Rhine into fits." I found things externally little changed under the new, or restored, Anglo-Benedictine régime, the chief visible difference being that my brethren now wore the flapping English hood, which gave them rather the aspect of large nuns. There was much coming and going to and from missions and {195} locum-tenancies of vacant parishes; and our house seemed destined to become more and more a "jumping-off place" for that kind of work rather than a great centre of monastic life and observance. One aim was not of course incompatible with the other, given a large enough community; but ours was at this time small enough, and there were several more or less permanent absentees. Most of the latter, however, "rolled up" for the excellent retreat given us by our good old friend Bishop Hedley, who had done us the same kindness just twenty-one years before. He was interested, after it was over, in hearing of our plans and hopes (then much "in the air") for re-starting the suspended building of our much-needed church, of which the foundation-stone had been laid nearly fifteen years previously. A young architect (an "old boy" of the abbey school) was staying with us, and quite prepared to produce the most fascinating designs at the shortest notice. But money, or the lack of it, was, as usual, the crucial point; and we did not "see our way" (horrid phrase) to resume operations either then or in the immediate future.