[20] Verse 4. "Filii tui sicut noveliæ olivarum, in circuitu mensæ tuæ." {19} CHAPTER II 1904 Abbot Gasquet, who had many friends in Oxford, was much in residence there during the summer of 1904, as he was giving the weekly conferences to our undergraduates. His host, Mgr. Kennard, usually asked me to dinner on Sundays, "to keep the Abbot going," which released me from the chilly collation (cold mutton and cold rhubarb pie), the orthodox Sabbath evening fare in so many households.[1] I recall the lovely Sundays of this summer term, and the crowds of peripatetic dons and clerics in the parks and on the river bank: many of them, I fancy, the serious-minded persons who would have thought it their duty, a year previously, to attend the afternoon university sermon, lately abolished. The afternoon discourse had come to be allotted to the second-rate preachers; and I had heard of a clergyman who, when charged with walking in the country instead of attending at St. Mary's, defended himself by saying that he preferred "sermons from stones" to sermons from "sticks!"[2] {20} The biggest clerical gathering I ever saw in Oxford was on a bright May afternoon in 1904, when hundreds of parsons were whipped up from the country to oppose the abolition of the statute restricting the honour-theology examinerships to clergymen. Scores of black-coats were hanging about the Clarendon Buildings, waiting to go in and vote; and they "boo'd" and cat-called in the theatre, refusing to let their opponents be heard. They carried their point by an enormous majority.[3] Kennard took me to London, on another day in May, to see the Academy--some astonishing Sargents, Mrs. Wertheimer all in black, with diamonds which made you wink, and the Duchess of Sutherland in arsenic green, painted against a background of dewy magnolia-leaves, extraordinarily vivid and brilliant. I was at Blenheim a few days later, and admired there (besides the wonderful tapestries and a roomful of Reynolds's) two striking portraits--one by Helleu, the other by Carolus-Duran--of the young American Duchess of Marlborough.