I found, on my return to our abbey, extensive repairs going on in view of the expected influx of visitors in September, and the procurator in despair at the dilatoriness of Highland workmen, recalling the famous plumber of Carstairs.[3] All the shooting-lodges were full, and expeditions to our monastery, when the shooters had an off-day, seemed one of the regular attractions of the neighbourhood. I remember one of our nearer neighbours, the shooting-tenant's wife from Glendoe, riding down one day to call, with Lady Winifred Elwes--the ladies astride, in ordinary frocks, on fat grey ponies, and our good lay-brother porter in speechless astonishment at the apparition. I was glad to welcome one day for an hour or two my old friends the Portsmouths, _en route_ for their remote castle of Guisachan: his lordship pompously pleasant as of old, and his wife equally pleasant without the pomposity. I presented them to the Bishop of Chur (or Coire), Mgr. Schmitt, at that time a guest in the abbey with his two chaplains. I had visited Chur more than thirty years before on my way to the Engadine (before the railway was made under the Albula Pass), and had visited the cathedral in quest of the supposed relics of St. Lucius, the king of Britain who, Bede says, wrote to Pope Eleutherius asking for instruction in the Christian faith. The Bishop had never heard this story; but he said that there was a constant tradition at Chur that Lucius was a Welsh saint who had died there after {214} spending many years in missionary labours among the Rhaetian Alps.[4] I spent the last Sunday of August as chaplain to the Lovats at Stronlairg, their remote lodge nestling under the great range of the Mona Liadh hills, in the wildest part of Central Inverness-shire. I have called it, and Guisachan, "remote"; but no place is really so, if accessible by a decent road, in these motoring days; and "neighbours" from thirty or forty miles away thought nothing of dropping in casually to luncheon or tea. Lady Derby, whose husband had one of Lovat's forests, came up one day with her daughter and her sister-in-law Lady Isobel Gathorne-Hardy, from whom I was sorry to hear a disquieting account of the health both of my niece Dorothy Cranbrook and of her husband. With our house-party and the servants, I had quite a congregation in our _chapelle provisoire_ on Sunday; and it was, as always, a happiness to me to have the privilege of saying mass for a little flock of faithful Catholics in the splendid solitude of these Highland hills and glens.