hardly seen the pleasant town since I had lived for a year in its environs with my family as a little boy; and the narrow bustling streets looked to me much as they used to under the Empire, when my father would point out to us the gallant Chasseurs d'Afrique swaggering along--"the finest soldiers in the world, sir--fought beside us in the Crimea,"--six short years before the _débâcle_ of 1870. We passed through Pont-de-Brique, and asked for the Château Neuf, the big rambling house in an unkempt garden which had been our home; but no one could point it out to us. My French visit was brought to an agreeable close by a trip across the Channel ("Why do you call it the _English_ Channel, you others?" my hostess asked me; "to us it is only La Manche!") in a beautiful schooner yacht belonging to a friend of the de Franquetots. We scudded along the English coast in bright sunshine, before a strong south-easterly breeze, finally landing at Southampton, whence I made my way to Kneller Court, which I found as friendly and hospitable as ever: Admiral Sir Percy and Lady Scott at luncheon with my kind sister-in-law, and subalterns and sub-lieutenants dropping in later for tennis and tea. My brother drove me up to Fort Nelson, and showed me his 60-pounders and the interior of the fort, one of the chain erected at enormous cost by Palmerston fifty years before, and now absolutely useless except as barracks. {127} Next day I escorted my pretty niece by dogcart, train and tram to Hilsea, to see the Gunners' sports--gun-driving, tent-pegging, wrestling on horseback, and so forth. It was my fifty-fifth birthday, and my health was pledged at dinner, with musical honours, by the merry party of relatives and friends. On October 1 I reached Oxford, superintended the transport of my effects from Beaumont Street (where my successor, Dom Anselm Parker, was already installed as Master of our Hall) to St. Aldate's, and received a kind welcome there from my host and new "chief," Mgr. Kennard. He was suffering from the peculiar constitutional disturbance--I believe a form of suppressed gout (King Edward was in his last years a victim to it) which keeps people always on the move; and this chronic restlessness took him away so constantly from Oxford that a great deal of his pastoral work--the spiritual superintendence of fifty or sixty Catholic undergraduates, scattered all over the university, at once devolved to great extent on me. The experiment of sending Catholic boys to Oxford (and Cambridge) had by this time passed out of the experimental stage, and had on the whole justified the anticipations of those to whose initiative it had been due. There were, of course, a few failures and a few wastrels among our small contingent of undergraduates; but on the whole they were a good lot of young fellows, who did credit to the various Catholic schools where they had been trained. And their personal kindness to me was such that