Our pleasant sojourn at Munich over, we made a bee-line home (as we had done from England to Bavaria), without stopping anywhere _en route_, as I was bound to be present at certain religious celebrations at Woodchester Priory, in the Vale of Stroud. I was always much attracted by the Gloucestershire home of the Dominican Order: it was built of the warm cream-coloured stone of the district, and with its gables, low spire, and high-pitched roofs looked as if it really belonged to the pretty village, and was not, like most modern monasteries, a mere accretion of incongruous buildings round an uninteresting dwelling-house.[8] From Woodchester I went over one day to Weston Birt, a vast ornate neo-Jacobean mansion set in the loveliest gardens, and a not unworthy country pendant to the owner's {27} palace in Park Lane, to which (as I told my hostess) I once adjudged the second place among the great houses of London.[9] I spent the rest of the Long Vacation at Fort Augustus, whither the summer-like autumn had attracted many visitors, and where a golf-course had been lately opened. Golf, too, and nothing but golf, was in the air during my annual visit to St. Andrews, which coincided with the Medal Week there. A lady told me that, looking for a book to give her golfing daughter on her birthday, she was tempted by a pretty volume called _Evangeline, Tale of a Caddie_, and was disappointed to find that Longfellow meant something quite different by "Acadie!" "Medal Day" was perfect, and the crowd enormous. I was passing the links as two famous competitors (Laidlaw and Mure Fergusson) came in--a cordon round the putting-green, and masses of spectators watching with bated breath. No cheers or enthusiasm as at cricket or football--a curious (and _I_ thought depressing) spectacle. In the club I came on old Lord ---- (of Session), anathematizing his luck and his partner, as his manner was. Some one told me that it was only at golf that he really let himself go. Once in Court he addressed a small boy, whose head hardly appeared above the witness-box, with dignified solicitude: "Tell me, my boy, do you understand the nature of an {28} oath?" "Aye, my lord," came the youngster's prompt response, "ain't I your caddie?" I think that it was at the climax of the medal-week festivities that the news came of the sudden death (in his sleep) of Sir William Harcourt at Nuneham, to which he had only lately succeeded. He had survived just ten years the crowning disappointment of his life, his passing-over for the premiership on the final resignation of Gladstone. He had long outlived (no small achievement) the intense unpopularity of his early years; and it seemed almost legendary to recall how three members of parliament had once resolved to invite to dinner the individual they disliked most in the world. Covers were laid (as the reporters say) for six; but only one guest turned up--Sir William Vernon Harcourt, who had been invited by all three!