I was happily able to escape, at the end of term, from these political alarums and excursions to the Continent. I longed for Italy; but the friend who accompanied me (and financed us both) insisted on carrying me to Nice--a place I never loved; and it proved sunless, the palms shivering in a mistral and we shivering in sympathy. I used to escape the odious Promenade des Anglais (much more a Promenade des Allemands) by climbing the steep steps into old-world Nizza, and talking to the good simple folk, who (so the parish priest assured me) remained devout and pious, and wonderfully little affected by the manners and morals of the objectionable crowd which haunts Nice more than any other spot on the _Côte d'Azur_, except, I suppose, Monte Carlo. The latter resort we eschewed (my friend and host was no gambler), but we had many strolls through the toy-city of Monaco, where the tourist is little in evidence. I noticed, crowning the picturesque promontory, the new cathedral built by M. Blanc out of casino profits, which the ecclesiastical {64} authorities accepted, I suppose, on the principle of the good old maxim, _Non olet!_[8] We took a run to Milan before turning homewards, and after an hour in the cathedral--impressively vast, but not (to my thinking) impressively beautiful, either without or within--spent a long day in exploring the far more interesting churches of SS. Maurizio, Maria delle Grazie, Vittore, Lorenzo, Giorgio, and Ambrogio, every one well worth visiting, and the last-named unique, of course, in charm and interest.[9] Turin, where we stayed a day, was wet and cold; but the arcades which line the chief streets at least keep the rain off. At Paris the sun was actually shining, and the trees on the boulevards sprouting greenly. I read in the English papers here of the engagement of my nephew Kelburn (the family had only recently dropped the final e from both the title and the castle)[10] to a Miss Hyacinth Bell, whose pretty floral name conveyed nothing to me. The {65} new Minister of Education[11] had also published his "Birreligious" Bill (as some wags nicknamed it): it seemed to satisfy nobody--least of all, of course, Catholics.