I got back to our abbey just in time to give the last blessing to our good old brother Nathalan, who died at the age of ninety-nine, the patriarch of the Benedictine Order in these islands and possibly in Christendom. A native of Glengairn, he spoke the Aberdeenshire idiom of his mother-Gaelic with remarkable purity and fluency; and he could talk for hours about beasts and birds, old smuggling adventures, second sight, and cognate subjects. His grandfather had fought for Prince Charlie at Culloden; and he knew the name and history of {261} every Glengairn man who had taken part in that historic battle. A man of robust faith and deep practical piety, he was content and happy in the monastery, which he had only entered when well over seventy. He was totally blind (though otherwise in good health) for some time before his death; and morning after morning his bowed and venerable figure, supported by a younger brother, might be seen wending its way to the chapel where he daily heard mass and received Holy Communion. I was glad to be at home for the closing hours of the life of the good simple old man, whose death made a felt blank in the family circle of our community. The early months of the eventful year 1914 passed quickly and quietly enough at our Highland abbey. We resolved soon after Easter to accept the contract for the building of the choir of our church--a venture of faith, for the necessary sum was not yet all in hand; but we felt that we were justified in making a start. A few days later came the interesting and gratifying news that the elevation of Abbot Gasquet to the Cardinalate--often rumoured in recent years--was actually decided on. This entailed an "extraordinary" meeting of Chapter in connection with the Abbot-president's resignation of that office; and going south to attend it, I took the occasion of accepting an invitation to officiate at the Corpus Christi procession at Arundel. It was a curiously impressive function in that old-world English town: the long _cortège_ of clergy and choristers and people, with the tall Venetian lanterns, scarlet and gold, waving above their heads as they passed slowly, to the sounds of sacred psalmody, under the grey walls of the castle and back into the great church of {262} St. Philip. I went on from Arundel to Oxford, to stay with Father Maturin, the acting Catholic chaplain there (his undergraduate flock now numbered nearly a hundred), and was delighted to see the good work he was doing. One was always sure of a good story from him; and _à propos_ of his wish to introduce hymn-singing at his Sunday services, he told me of the Sunday-school superintendent who, dissatisfied with the children's dead-alive singing of the well-known temperance hymn, "Little Drops of Water," himself repeated the first line, adding, "Now, please, put a little spirit into it!" My old tale of the don who objected to men coming to church in slippers reminded him, he said, of a college dean