I had the pleasure in November of paying a short visit to the wise and good Bishop of Newport, for a church-opening at Cardiff. A profit as well as a pleasure, one may hope; for indeed no one could spend any time in Dr. Hedley's company without instruction as well as edification. We spoke of the late Lord Bute's remarkable philological gifts; and I asked the Bishop if he had found his ignorance of Welsh any practical hindrance to the work of his diocese. "No," was his reply. "Fortunately for me (for I am no Mezzofanti) I find English a good enough means of communication with my people, the majority of whom are neither Welsh nor English, but Irish." I told him, much to his amusement, of the advice once given to an Englishman appointed to a Welsh (Anglican) see, as to the proper pronunciation of the Welsh double _l_. "May it please your lordship to place your episcopal tongue lightly against your right reverend teeth, and to hiss like a goose!" A young Oxford friend of mine whom I met at Cardiff carried me thence to Lichfield to stay a night at the Choristers' House of which his father was master. It chanced to be "Guy Fawkes Day," and I assisted at the fireworks and bonfires of the little singing-boys, who (I was rather interested to find) did not associate their celebration in the slightest degree with the old "No Popery" tradition. The merry evening concluded with some delightful part-singing. I recall a week-end at Arundel when term was over: a large and cheerful party, and the usual {106} "parlour games" after dinner, including dumb-crambo, in which I was almost the only spectator; for everybody else was acting, the Duke being a polar bear rolled up in a white hearthrug! My customary Christmas was spent at Beaufort, in a much-diminished family circle. Lord Lovat was on his way home from South Africa, one brother absent on a sporting tour in Abyssinia, another gold-mining in Rhodesia; his second sister with her husband in Japan, and two others still _en voyage_ round the world. Some schoolboy nephews, however, and their young sisters, were a cheerful element in our little party, and there was a great deal of golf, good, bad, and indifferent, on the not exactly first-class course recently laid out in the park.[7] I had to go south soon after New Year, to tie the knot and preach the wedding sermon at a marriage in Spanish Place Church.[8] A thoroughly Scottish function it was, with Gordon Highlander sergeants lining the long nave, the bridegroom's kilted brother-officers forming a triumphal arch with their claymores, and a big gathering of friends from the north afterwards at the Duchess of Roxburghe's pretty house in Grosvenor Street. I attended next evening at our Westminster dining-club, and heard {107} Father Maturin read a clever, if not quite convincing paper, on "The Broad and Narrow Mind," some of his paradoxes provoking a lively subsequent discussion which I found very interesting.