Accordingly, on one fine Sunday morning in June he conducted me to an elevated position whence the muster of the regiment with its splendid banners, and the full line of march――to the music of the finest band in the army, composed entirely of Highland instruments――could be distinctly observed. Then, taking a shorter turn, we entered the church, and secured a seat which overlooked the entrance of the troops within the sacred precincts. The full band was playing, and the music breathed the very spirit of their native hills. It was a spectacle never to be forgotten. The measured tramp of that multitude as the footfall of one man; their plumed bonnets lifted reverently before the sacred Presence by one simultaneous motion of the moving mass; their genuflections, performed with the same military and, as it seemed to a spectator, automatic precision and unity; the flash and clash of their arms, as they knelt in the wide space allotted to them under the central dome of the immense edifice; the rapt expression of devotion which lighted up each face; the music of the band, bursting forth at intervals during the most solemn parts of the first High Mass I had ever attended, now exquisitely plaintive and soul-subduing, and again swelling into a volume of glorious harmony which filled the whole church and electrified the hearts of the listeners――all this combined to produce emotions not to be expressed in words. Strangers visiting the city, and multitudes of its non-Catholic inhabitants, were drawn week by week to witness the solemn and soul-awakening ceremonial; first from curiosity, and afterwards, in many instances, from the conviction that a religion whence flowed a worship so sublime and irresistible in its power over the souls of men must be the creation of the great Author of souls. It seemed a fitting compensation to this noble race, after the degradation and oppression to which they had been subjected by their ruthless conquerors, that this valiant band of their sons should have been enabled to achieve such renown as gave them the most distinguished position in the British army, and placed them before the world with a prestige and a glory not surpassed by the bravest of their ancestors at the period of their greatest prosperity. But infinitely more precious than all earthly fame was the right, won back, as it were, by their arms, to practise fully and freely the religion of those ancestors, so long proscribed and forbidden to their people. Nor was it a slight satisfaction to their national pride and patriotism to be permitted to resume the costume which had also been proscribed and included in the suppression of the clans.