My friend MacCall, from Arundel, joined me at Dover, and we had a swift and uneventful journey to Venice (actually my first visit!) where I spent three crowded happy days--it was all I could spare--as the guest of an old Eton and Oxford friend in his delightful _palazzo_ on the Rio Marin. I cannot attempt any description: what impressed me most vividly, perhaps, apart from the incomparable glories of S. Marco, was our visit, in the amber and purple twilight of a Venetian May-day, to our Benedictine {243} church of St. George--its monastery (alas! almost derelict) and graceful rose-red campanile reflected in the deep azure of the lagoon. I regretfully left Venice that night, and travelling straight through Rome, in the company of abbots of various lands and languages, reached Cassino about mid-day, and was driven up the sacred mountain in a motor-car (an innovation since my last pilgrimage hither!) passing, at various turns of the excellent road, groups of peasants toiling up the rugged immemorial path to the monastery. We were welcomed by the kind abbot at the foot of the great staircase; and I was soon installed in a pleasant cell, with a view that almost took one's breath away over the wild and mountainous Abruzzi,[16] and the thin clear mountain air blowing in at one's window with delicious freshness. I do not think I ever attended such a series of prolonged and stately church functions as during the week of our sojourn at Monte Cassino. The chiefs of our Order in various countries officiated in turn at the different solemnities; and we abbots (seventy or eighty of us) sat perched on hard and narrow benches, tier upon tier, on either side of the high altar. One day it was a solemn requiem mass for the deceased benefactors of our Order: another, the consecration by the Cardinal Legate representing {244} the Pope,[17] assisted by two Benedictine archbishops, of the three altars in the crypt (this ceremony alone lasted five hours, and almost finished me!), whilst on Sunday his Eminence conducted the solemn high mass and subsequent procession, the great church, _cortili_ beyond, and every available foot of space being occupied by an immense and devout crowd of gaily-dressed peasants, most of whom had slept on the bare ground in the open air on the previous night. On this crowning day we were more than three hundred in the vast refectory for dinner, at the end of which a choir of monks chanted with thrilling effect the mediæval _Laudes_, or Acclamations of Hincmar, in honour of our illustrious guests. Among these magnates was my old friend of early days in Brazil, Bishop Gerard van Caloen, whom I had not seen for sixteen years.[18] He had grown a long grey beard, and his eyes looked out through his spectacles as sad and inscrutable as ever.[19] I sat next him at the _ludus liturgico-scenicus_, one of the diversions provided for us by the community: a grave musical setting of the life and death of Saints Benedict and Scholastica, so