The reverberations of the Great War were not unfelt even in our quiet home among the Highland hills; and our life, like the life of every class of the community in those years of storm and stress, was affected profoundly, and in many ways, by the {264} struggle which for four long years was rending the civilized world. A detailed record of those years of war, even so far as we were touched by it, would be out of place in this chronicle of peaceful days. Many of our former pupils, and some who had worn our habit and shared our life in the cloister, fought, and more than one died, for king and country: a band of devoted priests--few indeed, yet a large proportion of our total number--worked throughout the war, at home and abroad, as chaplains in the army and the navy, two of them being severely wounded, and two decorated by the King for their good service; and, finally, we who perforce remained at home had the consolation and satisfaction of receiving into our provisional hospital a long succession of wounded soldiers, Belgian and British, and of co-operating with the good people of our village and neighbourhood in the work of tending and succouring them. So, according to our measure, we "did our bit" like the rest, and could feel, when the day of peace at length dawned, that we had tried to render service to our country at a time when she had a right to the service of all her sons. * * * * * I write down these closing memories in our monastery under the Southern Cross, in the great South American city where my brethren in Saint Benedict, active and devoted men, but far too few for the ever-growing work that lies ready to their hands, are leading the same life of prayer and liturgy, untiring, pastoral labour, and the education of the young in religion and letters, which has been the mission of our Order all through the Christian centuries. It is high noon on this Brazilian summer's {265} day, and the fierce sun beats down from a cloudless sky on the luxuriant tropical garden which glows beneath the window of my quiet cell. At the foot of the last page I inscribe the same words as the monastic annalist inscribed of old beneath the laboriously-written manuscript which had been the work of his life: Explicit chronicon lx. annorum Deus misericordie miserere miseri scriptoris. And then, as, my task completed, I lay down my weary pen, there come into my mind some other words--those of a great thinker and a great writer of our own time: "Our life is planted on the surface of a whirling sphere: our prayer is to find its tranquil centre, and revolve no more." So may it be! [1] The good old abbot died three months later, on August 13, 1913. [2] Colonel David Hunter-Blair of the Scots Fusilier Guards, whose conversion to Catholicism, when I was a boy at Eton, had made a great impression on me. He died of consumption at Rome on March 31, 1869.