He often copied for his friend extracts which {34} struck him from books he was reading. "I have transcribed for you," he wrote a few weeks after his nineteenth birthday, "the account of the death of Krishna from the Vishnu Purána. A hunter by accident shot him in the foot with an arrow. When he saw what he had done he prostrated himself and implored pardon. Krishna granted it and translated him at once to heaven. 'Then the illustrious Krishna, having united himself with his own pure, spiritual, inexhaustible, inconceivable, unborn, undecaying, imperishable and universal spirit, which is one with Vásundera, abandoned his mortal body and the condition of the threefold qualities.' To my mind this description of the great Saviour becoming one with universal spirit approaches the sublime." At the end of his first summer term (June, 1866) Bute made his second tour in the East--a more extended one this time, visiting not only Constantinople and Palestine, but Kurdistan and Armenia. His tutor, the Rev. S. Williams, accompanied him, as well as one or two friends, including Harman Grisewood, one of his associates at the House, and one of the few with whom he maintained an intimacy after their Oxford days. A diary kept by Bute of the first portion of this tour has been preserved: it describes his doings with great minuteness, and is a remarkable record for a youth of eighteen to have written. In Paris nothing seems to have much interested him except the churches, and long antiquarian conversations with the Vicomte de Vogüé and others. "I again visited the Comte de V.,"[7] {35} runs one entry. "We got into the Cities of Bashan, and stayed there three or four hours." Many pages are devoted to a detailed description of Avignon, and later of St. John's Church at Malta, of Syracuse, Catania, and Messina. At Malta he visited the tomb of his grandfather (the first Marquess of Hastings, who died when governor of Malta in 1826), and "was much pleased with it." Describing the high mass in the Benedictine Church at Catania, he says, "At the end, during the Gospel of St. John, the organist (the organ is one of the finest in the world) played a military march so well that I, at least, could hardly be persuaded that the loud clear clash, the roll of the drums, the ring of the triangle, and the roar of the brass instruments were false. It seemed to me that this passage, which was admirably executed, harmonised wonderfully well with the awful words of the part of the Mass which it accompanied." [Sidenote: 1866, Ascent of Mount Etna] The young diarist's vivid descriptive powers are well shown in his narrative of the ascent of Etna, and the impression it made on him: