Term over, I went north to spend Christmas with the Butes at Mountstuart, where I found my young host, as was only natural, much interested in a recent decision of the Scottish Courts, which had diverted into his pocket £40,000 which his father had bequeathed to two of the Scottish Catholic dioceses.[16] My Christmas here (the first for many years) was saddened by old memories; for I missed at every turn the pervading presence of my lost friend, to whose taste and genius the varied beauty of his island home was so largely due. However, our large party of young people gave the right note {36} of hilarity to the time; and if there was little sunshine without (I noted that we had never a gleam from Christmas to New Year), there was plenty of warmth and brightness and merriment within. The graceful crypt (all that was yet available) of the lovely chapel was fragrant and bright with tuberoses, chrysanthemums and white hyacinths; and the religious services of the season were carried out with the care and reverence which had been the rule, under Lord Bute's supervision, for more than thirty years. The day after New Year, young Bute left home for London and Central Africa (the attraction of the black man never seemed to pall on him), and I made my way to our Highland Abbey to spend the remainder of the Christmas vacation. [1] "Do you very much mind dining in the middle of the day?" a would-be hostess at St. Andrews once asked George Angus. "Oh, not a bit," was his reply, "as long as I get another dinner in the evening!" [2] It was, I think, a Scottish critic who suggested an emendation of the line, "Sermons from stones, books in the running brooks." Obviously, he said, the transposition was a clerical error, the true reading being, "Sermons from books, stones in the running brooks!" [3] Another attempt, nine years later, to abolish the same statute was decisively defeated; but in 1920 the restriction of degrees in divinity to Anglican clergymen was removed by a unanimous vote, though the examinerships are still confined to clergymen. [4] "Well, now, that is not my idea of an owl," said a casual visitor to a bird-stuffer's shop, looking at one sitting on a perch in a rather dark corner. "Isn't it?" replied the bird-stuffer dryly, peering up over his spectacles. "Well, it's God's, anyhow." The owl was a live one! [5] The "young Blackfriar" obtained (in History) the first First Class gained in our Hall, rose to be Provincial of his Order in England, and had the happiness of seeing, on August 15, 1921, the foundation stone of a Dominican church and priory laid at Oxford.