An earlier date than might otherwise have been the case had been fixed for the abbatial election at Fort Augustus by the superiors of our Order, who desired that our abbey should be represented by its duly-constituted head at the great Benedictine gathering which was to take place in Italy this summer. The object of this assemblage, to which every abbot of Black Monks (_Monachi Nigri_) in Christendom received an invitation, was two-fold: first to assist at the consecration of the crypt of the church at Monte Cassino, the cradle of our venerable Order, after its complete restoration and decoration by the Beuron School of Benedictine artists; and secondly, to elect, in Rome, a coadjutor to the Abbot Primate of the Order, whose health had broken down. I went south in the last week of April, and after a flying visit to my sister in Surrey (where I said mass at the very pretty and well-kept church at Redhill), went on to stay with the French Benedictines at Farnborough, where two members of our Fort Augustus community were at that time in residence. They showed me much of interest, including the small museum of Napoleonic relics, and, of course, the crypt containing the massive granite sarcophagi containing the bodies of Napoleon {242} III. and his only son. It so chanced that the aged Empress (then in her eighty-eighth year) had been praying in the church when we entered it; and we saw her leaving in her carriage for her château a few hundred yards away. I thought, as I glanced at the frail shrunken figure leaning on her staff, of a summer day in Paris forty-eight long years before, when I had seen her, a radiant and beautiful vision, walking in the Tuileries gardens with her little son, amid the admiring plaudits of an apparently devoted people. The young prince was mounted on a sort of two-wheeled hobby-horse, gaily painted and gilt, and I asked my companion (a French lady) what it might be. "Ah!" she replied, "c'est une invention absolument nouvelle: cela s'appelle un' 'vé-lo-ci-pède'!" The only other occasion on which I ever saw the Empress was in Rome some ten years later, when she came, widowed and dethroned, to pay her respects to the venerable Pontiff Pius IX. I have described elsewhere[15] this memorable visit, which I was privileged to witness as being at that time a chamberlain on duty at the Vatican.