I had been endeavouring to interest our friends in the south in our desire to reopen the Abbey School when feasible; but at a Council held at the abbey on my return it was decided to leave that project in abeyance, and to concentrate our efforts meanwhile on trying to replace the ramshackle shed which served as our church by at least a part of the permanent building. Harrowing appeals in the Catholic press, embodying views of the shanty in question: a personal campaign undertaken by some of the fathers, and begging-letters of the most insidiously-persuasive kind, were part of the plan of campaign, which met with a fair measure of success. There was some feeling in our community in favour of a very much less ambitious (and expensive) church than originally planned; but I personally would be no party to any scheme involving the abandonment of our hopes to see built a real abbey church, worthy of the site and the surroundings, and the erection instead of a neat, simple, and inexpensive R.C. chapel, which seemed the ideal of some of the less {220} imaginative of our brethren. I was receiving invitations from various Scottish centres to repeat my Hay lecture; and this, we thought, might be judiciously combined with efforts on behalf of our building-fund. I went to Blairs College, outside Aberdeen, for the old bishop's actual centenary (which we had anticipated at Fort Augustus), and lectured to the students and their professors there. On my way back, I visited, for the first time, our "cell" at St. James's, high above the pretty prosperous sea-port of Buckie. The place pleased me--a conveniently-planned house, standing among pine-woods and meadows, with a fine prospect over land and sea; and a nice chapel, simple and devout, with a gaily-gilt altar from Tyrol. I gave my lecture in three other places during these weeks of early winter: at Motherwell, where my lantern failed me, and I was grateful to my audience for listening to an hour's dry talk without pictures; in Edinburgh, where I had a large and very appreciative audience; and in Glasgow, where a still bigger gathering filled the City Hall, and was really enthusiastic. It was all very fatiguing; and I was glad to get home and enjoy a little rest and peace before Christmas. Beaufort, too, where I acted as Christmas chaplain as usual, was restful this year, with only a small family party, and the Lovats getting ready for a trip to Egypt and Khartoum. We had a long, severe, and stormy winter in the Highlands: gale after gale, in which our poor wooden church swayed and shivered and creaked like the old _Araguaya_ in the Bay of Biscay; and then bitter frosts with the thermometer down in the neighbourhood of zero, and all the able-bodied {221} monks smashing the ice in the "lade," in order to keep the current going for our electric light. Meanwhile we were cheered by the general interest, even in far-off lands, in our church-building crusade.