Lunching at the new Caledonian, on my way through London, I found myself next young Bute, dreadfully depressed about the coal-strike, and (not for the first time) looking forward to the workhouse for himself and family. My next lecture was due at St. Edmund's College, Ware, where I had the honour of numbering among my audience the {223} brand-new Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster,[12] imposing in his brand-new rose-coloured robes, but as kind and gracious as ever. In the middle of my lecture (I had an audience of nearly 300) the "divine" (as the church students were called) in charge of the lighting startled us all by suddenly crying out, "There is going to be an explosion!" and the next moment a flame shot up from the lantern almost to the ceiling. "Only that and nothing more"; but it was quite sufficiently alarming for the moment. Next day we enjoyed a motor-drive through the pretty pastoral country, and saw in the course of it one curious sight--a suffragist female (militant by the look of her) standing on a stool just outside the lychgate of a village church, and addressing an apparently very unreceptive audience of open-mouthed Hertfordshire yokels. Holy Week and Easter found me again at Arundel, where there was a holiday gathering of many young people at the castle, the youngest member of the party being the Duke's baby daughter, who was christened Katherine the day after my arrival. "_Absit omen!_" whispered (not very tactfully, I thought) the good vicar of Arundel, as we drank tea and nibbled the christening cake after the ceremony--looking up, as he spoke, at a portrait of the baby's luckless ancestress Queen Katherine Howard. "Il n'y a pas de danger," I whispered back; but I don't know whether he understood French. I was amused afterwards, talking to the nurse of the Duchess's small nephews and nieces, to hear _her_ opinion of the castle and its glories. {224} "A dreadful place for children, _I_ call it, with all these towers and battlements and dungeons and hiding-holes--one never knows where they'll get to next. A London house for me, where there's children to look after!" The services were jubilant, and the great church beautifully adorned on Easter Sunday, and the choir warbled what poor Angus[13] used to call the "sensuous harmonies" of Gounod in their best style. Yet more children arrived after Easter, including three tomboy great-nieces of our host; and there were great games in the vast Baron's hall--roller-skating on the expanse of polished floor, and dancing to the rather inadequate strains of a wheezy gramophone which had suffered from the depredatory explorations of my lord of Arundel and Surrey and his sisters.