(a Eucharistic hymn by a Catholic composer!) being played on a fine organ, and wondered what old John Knox would have thought about it all. Meanwhile the Catholics of Dunblane, a devout and fervent little flock (so I was told), had perforce to content themselves with a poor loft, where I preached {206} to them on two Sundays. At Stirling, not far distant, there was a new church designed by Pugin--a rather dismal and angular edifice, but anyhow spacious and well kept. On my return journey to Fort Augustus, I found myself condemned, by the unholy rivalry of the Caledonian and North British Railways, to a four hours' wait at Crianlarich, where I found the temperature, on a frosty January morning, quite as "invigorating" as did the fabled tourist.[15] I had a few busy days at the abbey preparing for my return to South America. My passage was booked for the middle of January: I had devoted a week to farewells to relatives and friends--and then came the anti-climax! On the very day on which (like the poor Sisters of Mercy) I was to have "breasted the billows of the Atlantic"[16] _en route_ for Brazil, I received so discouraging and peremptory a letter from my London oculist, as to the risk to my remaining eye of a possibly stormy winter voyage, that I had perforce to abandon the idea, and to return (like the bad sixpence of poor Grissell's story)[17] to my {207} northern monastery, where I received so brotherly a welcome home that I did not, after the first disappointment, regret the change of plan. I was inducted again into my old office of librarian (first entrusted to me twenty-seven years before); and our young organist having gone into residence at the Benedictine Hall at Oxford, I acted for a time as his substitute. The post of subprior being presently vacated by the departure of the then holder of the office for a Liverpool mission, that also was committed to me; and as our good prior was at this time to some extent invalided, I found myself pretty fully occupied, more especially as I had in those days a curiously cosmopolitan correspondence (much of it on literary or antiquarian matters), which could not be neglected. I recall receiving by a single mail (on St. Benedict's Day, as it chanced), letters from India, North America, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Soudan! [1] Alan, the Glasgows' youngest son, had taken up flying most enthusiastically, living in a shed at Brooklands (his mechanic acting as his cook), and practising continually with his Avis monoplane, which, like himself, was of purely Scottish origin. He had been the third flying-man to gain an aero-certificate on a machine of British design and build. [2] My nephew's recovery was slow and tedious; but he was ultimately restored to health. [3] Her grandmother, Emma Lady Ribblesdale (born a Mure of Caldwell) was my father's first cousin.