I had a stimulating neighbour in Baron Anatole von Hügel. The opening of the Lent Term of 1908 at Oxford was dreary enough, with a succession of the dense white fogs which only the Thames valley generates in perfection. It is not cheering to come down morning after morning to find what looks like a huge bale of dirty cotton-wool piled up against one's window-panes; and the news at this time was as depressing as the weather. We heard early in February of the brutal murder of the King and Crown Prince of Portugal, before the eyes of wife and mother; and I was saddened in the same month by the death of an exemplary member of our community at Fort Augustus, though that had been long expected. I was myself on the sick-list, and recall little of interest during these weeks, except a most excellent lecture--of course on boy scouts--given by General Baden-Powell, which I only wished could have been heard, not by dons, ladies, and undergraduates, but by the cigarette-slobbering, street-corner-loafing lads who were, I think, more in evidence at Oxford than anywhere else. Early in March I was in London, for the wedding of my old pupil, Charles Vaughan of Courtfield, to the pretty niece of the Duke of Newcastle. I got to Westminster Cathedral an hour before the appointed time: the chapter-mass was being celebrated, and waves of sonorous plain-song floating about the great misty domes overhead. After the ceremony I joined the wedding guests at the Ritz for a short time, and, amid the _frou-frou_ {108} and _va-et-vient_ of all the smart people, managed to impart to a few intimate friends the news that I was going into hospital in a few days, with no very certain prospect of coming out alive! The next fortnight or so was of course taken up with inevitable worries--giving up work for an indefinite period, resigning for a time (it turned out to be for good) the mastership of my Hall, and finding a _locum tenens_ letter-writing to a host of inquiring friends, and all this when physically fit to do nothing. I spent the last days of freedom at Arundel, receiving from the good people there every possible kindness; and on March 18, under the patronage of the Archangel Gabriel (saint of the day), betook myself to my nursing home in Mandeville Street. Nurses (mine were most kind and devoted), surgeons and anæsthetists soon got to work; and for a time at least (in the almost classic words of Bret Harte) "the subsequent proceedings interested me no more."