[14] "My lord! my lord!" a Midlothian farmer (who had just been served with an iced soufflé) whispered to his host at a tenants' dinner at Dalmeny: "I'm afraid there's something wrang wi' the pudden: it's stane cauld." Lord Rosebery instantly called a footman, and spoke to him in an undertone. "No, do you know?" he said, turning to his guest with a smile, "it is quite right. I find that this kind of pudding is _meant_ to be cold!" [15] Less so, however, than the then Earl of Leicester (the second), between whose eldest daughter (already a grandmother) and youngest child there was an interval of some fifty years. Lord Ronald Gower once told Queen Victoria (who liked such titbits of family gossip) the astonishing, if not unique, fact that Lord Leicester married exactly a century after his father. The Queen flatly refused to believe it; and as the Court was at the moment at Aix-les-Bains, Lord Ronald was for the time unable to adduce documentary evidence that he was not "pulling her Majesty's leg." The respective dates were, as a matter of fact, 1775 and 1875. [16] Lord Bute could never do anything quite like other people; and his legacies to Galloway and Argyll had been hampered by conditions to which no Catholic bishop, even if he accepted them for himself, could possibly bind his successor. {37} CHAPTER III 1905 There had been an official visitation, by Abbot Gasquet, of our abbey at Fort Augustus in January, 1905. I had been unable to attend it, but the news reached me at Oxford that one of its results had been the resignation of his office by the abbot. This was not so important as it sounded; for the Holy See did not "see its way" (horrid phrase!) to accept the proffered resignation, and the abbot remained in office. I attended this month a Catholic "Demonstration," as it was called (a word I always hated), in honour of the Bishop of Birmingham--or the "Catholic Bishop of Oxford," as an enthusiastic convert, who had set up a bookshop in the city, with a large portrait of Bishop Ilsley in the window, chose to designate him. The function was in the town hall, and Father Bernard Vaughan made one of his most florid orations, which got terribly on the nerves of good old Sir John Day (the Catholic judge), who sat next me on the platform. "Why on earth doesn't somebody stop him?" he whispered to me in a loud "aside," as the eloquent Jesuit "let himself go" on the subject of the Pope and the King. On the other hand, I heard the Wesleyan Mayor, who was in the chair, murmur to _his_ {38} neighbour, "This is eloquence indeed!" "Vocal relief" (as the reporters say at classical concerts) was afforded by a capital choir, which sang with amazing energy, "Faith of our Fathers," and Faber's sentimental hymn, the opening words of which--"Full in the pant" ... are apt to call forth irreverent smiles.