I was glad to find myself settled for some golden weeks of August and September at our abbey among {97} the Highland hills, where we were this autumn favoured with almost continuous sunshine. Our many guests came and went--some of them busy city men, enjoying to the full the pure air, lovely surroundings, and quiet life in our guest-house, all to the accompaniment of chiming bells and chanted psalms. Whether they found our "brown Gregorians" as devotional as the sentimentalist of Mr. Hichens's novel[1] I know not; but anyhow to me our monastic plain-chant was restful and pleasant after the odd stuff in the way of "church music" which had elsewhere assailed my ears. I confess that after our more normal Oxford hours (though I hope we were not sluggards at our Hall), I reconciled myself with difficulty to "the hour of our uprising" in the monastery. The four o'clock matin-bell had always been more or less of a penance to me (as I suppose it was to most of my brethren), though I tried to fortify myself with Dr. Johnson's argument--a purely academic one in the case of that lie-abed old sage--that "it is no slight advancement to obtain for so many more hours the _consciousness of being_"; but an American guest of ours, to whom I cited this dictum, countered it by a forcibly-expressed opinion "on the other side" by one of the most eminent living specialists in insanity.[2] {98} One recalls delicious rambles with our brethren or our guests during those sunlit autumn days: sometimes among the verdant Glengarry woods, sometimes at our outlying "chapel-of-ease," some miles up the most beautiful of the glens which run from Central Inverness-shire to the sea. A veritable oasis this among the hills, with its green meadows, waving pines, and graceful bridge spanning the rushing river; and all framing the humble chapel, its eastern wall adorned with a fresco (from the brush of one of our artist monks[3]) which the little flock--sadly diminished of late years by emigration--greatly admired and venerated. A week-end was sometimes spent pleasantly and not unprofitably at some remote shooting-lodge, saying mass for Catholic tenants, and perhaps a handful of faithful {99} Highlanders. One such visit I remember this autumn at a lodge in Glencarron, a wild wind-swept place, with the surrounding hilltops already snow-coated, which Lord Wimborne (for some years Lovat's tenant at Beaufort) had recently acquired. Although in the heart of the forest, the lodge was but two hundred yards from the railway; there was no station, but the train would obligingly stop when signalled by the wave of a napkin from the front door! A crofter's cow strayed on the line one day of my stay, was, by bad luck, run over by one of the infrequent trains, and (as a newspaper report once said of a similar mischance) "cut literally into _calves_."[4] The night before I left Glencarron, we were all wakened, and some of us not a little