[19] My friend Lord Ralph Kerr had, some time previously, refused to preside at a meeting of the same Society (of which he was president) in another Scottish city, on learning that the local committee would not permit the National Anthem to be sung at the close. The reason alleged, that "the Irish in the audience would not stand it," did not, naturally, strike the gallant Scottish general as an adequate one. {74} CHAPTER V 1906-1907 Before returning to Oxford for the autumn term of 1906, I spent a pleasant ten days at Abbotsford with my old friends the Lane Foxes, and visited with them Dryburgh Abbey, Galashiels, and other interesting places. Melrose, too, we thoroughly explored, agreeing that (_pace_ Sir Walter) the time for seeing it "aright" was _not_ "by the pale moonlight," but on a sunlit afternoon, which alone does justice to the marvellous colouring--grey shot with rose and yellow--of the old stone. Modern textbooks talk of the "decadence" of its architecture, but it has details of surpassing beauty nevertheless. It was ill exchanging the beauties of Tweedside in perfect September weather for foggy London. I arrived there on a Sunday morning, just in time for high mass at Westminster Cathedral, of which a fog rather enhances the charm, softening the raw brick walls and imparting a mysterious and shadowy splendour to the great spaces under the lofty domes. The grave polyphonic music, perfectly rendered, greatly pleased me; but the acoustics of the building seemed to be defective.[1] A noted preacher was discoursing {75} to an immense congregation on "Pessimism"--so the notice-boards informed me; but it might as well have been on Optimism for anything I could hear of it. Walking homewards to Regent's Park, I looked in at a Ritualistic church in Red Lion Square, where a singular function was in progress in presence of the (schismatic) Archbishop of Sinai, under the auspices of a body styling itself "The Anglican and Orthodox Churches Union."[2] As I entered, a clergyman was just remarking from the pulpit that as there was no visible Church on earth, or as, at any rate, it was temporally broken to bits, there was no use in looking for a visible head! a theory which his audience may or may not have found satisfactory.[3]