A New Medley of Memories

by Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair

CHAPTER VII

1908

I passed the closing days of the summer term of 1908 very pleasantly at Oxford, receiving many kindnesses from old friends, mingled with expressions of regret that my official connection with the university was approaching its close. I recall an interesting dinner-party at Black Hall, the Morrells' delightful old house in St. Giles's, where my neighbour was Miss Rhoda Broughton, at that time resident near Oxford. We talked, of course, of her novels; and the pleasant-faced, grey-haired lady was amused to hear that my sisters were not allowed to read Cometh Up as a Flower, and Red as a Rose is She[[1]] (considered strong literary food in the early 'seventies), until they "came out." Mrs. Temple, the archbishop's widow, was also a fellow-guest: she had taken a house in Oxford, close to "dear Keble"; but said that the noise and uproar emanating at night from the college of "low living and high thinking" was so great that she thought she would have to move. A member of the lately-established Faculty, or Institute, of Forestry, who was of our party, told us some "things not generally known" about trees, which I noted down. The biggest tree known in the world was, he said, not in America (what a relief!), but the great chestnut at the foot of Mount Etna, called the Chestnut of a Hundred Horses, with a trunk over 200 ft. round, and a hole through it through which two carriages can drive abreast. The biggest orange-tree known was, said our oracle, in Terre Bonne, Louisiana: 50 ft. high, 15 ft. round at base, and yielding 10,000 oranges annually. Finally, the most valuable tree in existence was the plane-tree in Wood Street, in the City, occupying a space worth, if rented, £300 a year—a capital value of £9,000 or thereabouts. All these facts I thought curious.

Term over, I stayed for a little time with a sister in Kensington Gore, very handy for Kensington Gardens, where I sat an hour or two every morning enjoying the fresh air and verdure of that most charming of "London's lungs," and surrounded by frolicking children, including my small nephew. One of his little playfellows, a grandson of Lord Portman, suddenly disappeared from the gay scene; I inquired where he was, and was told that he had gone for a rest-cure. "Great heavens!" I said, "a child of three!—but why, and where?"—"Oh," was the reply, "Master Portman was taking too much notice of the busses and motor-cars and such-like, and wouldn't go to sleep; so he is taking a rest-cure in his nursery at the top of the house, looking over the chimney-pots!" The modern child! but then I do not of course profess to understand infants and their ways and needs.

The White City, with its Irish village, and a notable exhibition of French and English pictures, was a great attraction this summer. A kind cousin motored me thither once or twice; and I met a little later at her house some pleasant Italian cavalry officers, smart in their Eton blue uniforms, who were going to jump at the horse-show at Olympia. I went, at their urgent invitation, to see their performance, and was both interested and impressed. As an exhibition of the art of show-jumping it seemed to me unsurpassable. The horse answered the very slightest movement of the leg or body of its rider, who, as he rose to each leap, was so perfectly pivoted on the insides of his knees that his balance remained absolutely unaffected. The French competitors combined pace and dash with their excellent horsemanship; and the finest horses were certainly those ridden by the English. But the cool, quiet, scientific, deliberate riding of the Italians, trained in the finest school in the world, made all their rivals seem, somehow, a little rough and flurried and amateurish; and they gained, as they undoubtedly deserved, the chief honours of the show.

The heat in July was great; and I was so depressed, visiting the great National Rose Show in the Botanic Gardens, by the spectacle of 100,000 once lovely blossoms hopelessly wilted and shrivelled, that I fled from London to a brother's shady river-side home near Shepperton. It was reposeful under the big elms overhanging his garden, to watch the boat-laden Thames gliding past; and another pleasure which I enjoyed whilst there was a quite admirable organ-recital given at a neighbouring church—Littleton, I think it was. The kind rector showed us round and gave us tea; and the sight of the many tattered regimental colours (Grenadier Guards and others) hanging on the church walls drew down upon him the following lines, which I sent him next day in acknowledgment of his courtesy:—

THE COLOURS

(Hung in churches: no longer [1908] taken into action.)

That rent is Talavera; that patch is Inkerman:
A hundred times in a hundred climes the battle round them ran.
But that is an ended chapter—they will not go to-day:
Hang them above as a link of love, where the people come to pray.

*****

Perhaps when all is quiet, and the moon looks through the pane,
Under that shred the splendid dead are marshalled once again,
And hear the guns in the desert, and see the lines on the hill,
And follow the steel of the lance, and feel that England is
England still.

I found it very little cooler in Yorkshire than in London; but there were noble trees and welcome shade in the beautiful park of Langdon, near Northallerton, where I spent some July days, in an atmosphere a thought too equine for my taste; however, my kind hosts (the Fifes) were as fond of their flowers as of their horses, and were busy adding wildernesses and rockeries and other informal beauty-spots to the formal gardens of their new home, which they had recently bought from Lord Teignmouth. I was driven over one day to see the Hospital of St. John of God at Scorton, where a hundred inmates, all crippled or disabled, were tended with admirable care and devotion by a religious brotherhood. A local clergyman, I remember, dined with us that evening at Langdon—a man whose mission, or hobby, seemed to be to collect and retail such odd and out-of-the-way facts as one finds in the statistical column of Tit-Bits. In the course of the evening he informed us (1) that a pound of thread spun by a silkworm will make a thread 600 miles long; (2) that there are in the skin of the average man 2,304,000 pores; and (3) that about 30,000 snails are eaten every day in the city of Paris. What one feels about such facts, dumped down on one promiscuously, is that they do not lead anywhere, or afford any kind of opening for rational conversation.

I had rather hoped to escape the burden of my Oxford Local Examination work this summer; but as it was apparently difficult to replace me, I went up to Dumfries for my usual week in July. Our Convent-school being the only centre in the district for these examinations, there were, as usual, several candidates from outside. Among them were two pairs of Protestant sisters (Wedderburn-Maxwells and Goldie-Scotts), whose mamma and governess respectively sat all day in the corridor outside the big schoolroom, keeping watch and ward, it was understood, against the danger of their children being "got at" between the papers by the nuns—or possibly the Benedictine examiner!—and influenced in the direction of Popery. Our children were much amused by the way in which these little girls were whisked away, during the intervals, from any possible contact with their "Roman" fellow-candidates; but the little girls themselves looked somewhat disconsolate, having perhaps had pleasant anticipations of games, between examination-hours, in the well-equipped playground of the school.

The kind abbot of Fort Augustus would not let me return to the monastery, as I had expected to do when my Dumfries work was over, but suggested instead some further rest (for I was still far from robust) with my own people in the west of Scotland. I spent a few pleasant days first at Mountstuart, and was rather amused on the first of August (the end of the "close season" for small birds) to see my young host sally forth—a sailor, an architect, and an artist in his wake—on a shooting-expedition, with as much ceremony and preparation as if it had been the Twelfth![[2]] We motored out after them, and lunched on one of the highest points of the island; drinking in, as we ate our Irish stew, an entrancing prospect of the blue Firth, the long sinuous Ayrshire coast, and the lofty serrated peaks of Arran. From Bute I went on to Dunskey, a place full to me always—even under its new, altered, and improved conditions—of a hundred happy memories. There was an al fresco entertainment—tea, music, and dancing on the lawn—given by my niece to the tenants and their families one afternoon; and I (mindful of old days) was happy to watch her and her boy, the little heir, welcoming their guests. Some of their names, Thorburns, Withers and MacWilliams, recalled the past; and they greeted me with the friendly simple cordiality characteristic of Galloway folk. One of our house-party had just arrived (by yacht) from the Isle of Man, where he had been staying for some weeks. He had stories of the quaint customs of the Men of Man, and wrote down for me the oath administered in their courts. The closing simile is delightfully unconventional:—

By this book, and by the holy contents thereof, and by the wonderful works that God has miraculously wrought in heaven above and in the earth beneath in six days and seven nights, I do swear that I will, without respect of favour or friendship, love or gain, consanguinity or affinity, execute the laws of this isle, and between party and party as indifferently as the herring's backbone doth lie in the middle of the fish.

At Blairquhan I found a large party assembling for August 12: naval cronies of my sailor brother (including the captain of H.M.S. Britannia), the master of the Whaddon Chase Hunt, Selby Lowndes, with his wife and daughter, and other pleasant people. Shooting, dancing, bridge and golf filled up their days agreeably enough. I essayed the last-named sport, but was mortified to find myself still as weak as a kitten. The weather was glorious, but my brother complained that the long drought had left not a fruit in the garden; whereupon I suggested the substitute mentioned by Captain Topham in his Letters from Edinburgh a century and a half ago:—

The little variety of fruit which this climate brings to perfection is the cause that the inhabitants set anything on their tables, after dinner, that has the appearance of it; and I have often observed at the houses of principal people a dish of small turnips, which they call neeps, introduced in the dessert, and ate with as much avidity as if they had been fruit of the first perfection.

The perfect summer weather accompanied me north to Beaufort, which was doubly fortunate, as a great party was gathered there for a gigantic bazaar, organized by one of the daughters of the house to raise funds for a county sanatorium for consumption, in which she was greatly interested. The difficulty of attracting men to a show of the kind, especially in the shooting season, was cleverly met by including among the attractions a novel and unique exhibition of stags' heads, lent from all the great Highland forests. The interest of this drew sportsmen from far and near to Beaufort, where a notable company was assembled, including the whole Lovat family, most of the Chiefs of clans and their wives, and, last not least, Ranguia, a genuine chieftain from New Zealand, clad in what was understood to be his native dress, and gifted with an astonishing voice (tenore robustissimo), in which he sang Maori songs of love and war in the great gallery at intervals during the two days of the bazaar. The most charming of British Duchesses opened the proceedings with a speech of enticing eloquence: sales were brisk, the weather perfect, and the attendance enormous; and the profits, if I remember right, were something like £4,000, so that the affair was altogether a success. We recreated ourselves, after these fatiguing days, by a pleasant motor drive to Oromarty, to see the splendid fleet (the Fifth Cruiser Squadron (and some battleships of the Home Fleet) mustered in the Firth. We went all over the Dreadnought, and drank tea on Kelburn's ship, the Cochrane, burst a tyre on our way home and took refuge at Balnagowan, where Lady Ross gave us dinner and sang to us perfectly delightfully: a full and interesting day.

Ampleforth Abbey having now Masters of Arts of its own qualified to take over the Mastership of its Oxford Hall, I took the occasion of my enforced temporary retirement to resign the office which I had held for nearly ten years. The inevitable regrets were tempered by the kind tributes I received both from Ampleforth and from the Vice-chancellor of the University; and also by my friend Mgr. Kennard's urgent invitation (which I was authorized to accept) that I should return to Oxford for a time as his guest and assistant-chaplain. This settled, I went south to visit the Loudouns at Loudoun Castle, cheerfully repainted and decorated in honour of the arrival of the family pictures, an accession to Loudoun since his brother Paulyn Hastings' death. At Woodburn, whither I went from Loudoun, I found Philip Kerr at home from Johannesburg (where he was, I think, Secretary to the High Commissioner)—looking as young as ever, the cynosure of his adoring family and of a circle of admiring friends, one or two of whom (I think old schoolfellows at Edgbaston) were staying at Woodburn. The talk turned, as so often in this house, on Newman and the Oratory; and Lord Ralph Kerr read a striking passage written by Coventry Patmore[[3]] soon after the great Cardinal's death:—

The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work: that tongue which had the weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent.

I recalled a characteristic sentence or two (half jest, half earnest), from one of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce's letters to Mrs. Sarjent:—

Newman was at Ryder's, but I thought it best not to see him. I heard that unmistakable voice like a volcano's roar, tamed into the softness of the flute-stop, and got a glimpse (may I say it to you?) of the serpentine form through an open door—the Father Superior!

In lighter vein Philip told us some odd Johannesburg stories. One was of a man who had arrived there some years before with absolutely no assets except a tin of condensed milk and a needle. He spread a report that smallpox was on its way through the country, gave out that he was a surgeon, and vaccinated the entire community with his needle and condensed milk, at 5s. a head! From this beginning he rose to be a wealthy capitalist, with the monopoly of selling liquor within the precincts of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Woodburn was admirably handy for the Edinburgh libraries, in which I put in several days' work (much belated during my illness) for the Encyclopædia. September I spent happily at St. Andrews, where my friend and host George Angus, though now a good deal of an invalid, was as kind and pleasant as ever. We had talks on heraldry, a favourite subject with us both; and I remember his rubbing his hands with delight on reading (on the authority of Juliana Berners, prioress of Sopewell), that the four Evangelists were "gentlemen come by the right line of that worthy conqueror Judas Maccabæus"; and also that the Four Latin Doctors, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory, were gentlemen of blood and coat-armour."[[4]] I copied from one of his early heraldic books the arms anciently assigned to:—

Adam (before the Fall)—a shield gules, whereon a shield argent borne on an escutcheon of pretence [arms of Eve, she being an heiress].

Do. (after the Fall)—paly tranché, divided every way, and tinctured of every colour.

Joseph—chequy, sable and argent.

David—argent a harp or.

Gideon—sable, a fleece argent, a chief azure gutté d'eau.

Samson—gules, a lion couchant or, within an orle argent, sémé of bees sable.

I saw something at St. Andrews of another old acquaintance, Jock Dalrymple, now Stair, who had some little time before succeeded his father (the kind old friend of my youth), and had grown grey, portly, and rather solemn since coming into his kingdom. He was Captain of the Royal and Ancient this year; and although he boasted of "hating politics," and would not trouble to vote in Parliament on the most vital Imperial question, would sit for hours in the chair at a club meeting, discussing the minutiae of golfing rules with a zest and patience that never failed. Men are curiously made!

I went, while at St. Andrews, to spend a weekend with the Fairlies at their neighbouring castle of Myres (set in the most enchanting old Scottish garden), and said mass in a billiard-room converted by my friend into a decorous chapel, just as had been done by Bishop Hedley in his episcopal villa near Cardiff. I noticed with interest the mace sculptured on one of the angular turrets. Thereby hung a tale—and a grievance; and my host told me how the presentation of a macership in the Court of Session went with the ownership of Myres, i.e. of the castle, as he maintained. But though he had bought the castle, my Lord Bute had bought the estate (marching with his lands of Falkland); and his contention was that the estate, not the castle, carried with it the macership.[[5]] Hinc illæ lacrymæ.

I left St. Andrews early on a bright autumn morning, my kind old friend, who had insisted on getting up to serve my mass, waving me good-bye under his hospitable porch—a last good-bye it proved to be, for I never saw him again.[[6]] Before going south I spent a few days at Aberdeen, having some business with our good bishop. I stayed with Malcolm Hay of Seaton (one of my very few Catholic relations) at his pretty old place on Donside. From the windows one looked across the river, and up a wooded brae, to the venerable towers of St. Machar's Cathedral. Malcolm motored me one day to Blairs College; I had not before seen the new buildings and church of our Scottish seminary, quite an imposing pile as viewed from the much-frequented Deeside road. We found the Archbishop of St. Andrews (Mgr. Smith) at tea with the Rector and his professorial staff, who were all most kind and civil. I heard here of the elevation of the eminent advocate, Campbell of Skerrington, to the Scottish Bench—the first Catholic Lord of Session for generations, if not centuries.

I was due in Oxford before the opening of the autumn term, in view of my prospective "flitting" from our Benedictine Hall; but I first fulfilled a long overdue engagement to pay a visit to some French friends (the Marquis de Franquetot and his wife) in Picardy. Their pretty château, embowered in big chestnut-trees, was some ten miles from Boulogne, and we drove thither on Sunday to high mass at St. Nicholas-in-the-Market, as my host wanted me to hear the French Bishops' joint pastoral (the first they had been permitted to issue for a great number of years) on Christian education. M. de Franquetot said it had been prepared under the roof of my old friend Lady Sophia Palmer, Comtesse de Franqueville, who, with her excellent husband, had entertained the whole hierarchy for a week at their beautiful hôtel in the Bois de Boulogne. The congregation at St. Nicholas was very large and devout, comprising, as I was pleased to observe,[[7]] many men of all ranks and ages; and the long pastoral, addressed "aux pères et mères de famille," and interspersed with admirable comments from the good curé, was listened to with close attention, and approval, which the "pères de famille" occasionally showed by thumping the floor with sticks or umbrellas, and muttering—not always sotto voce—"Très bien dit,"—"ils ont bien raison," and so on. I was very glad to have been present. Boulogne seemed full of British trippers; and I was amused, as we drove along the sea-front, to see the number of unmistakably French eating-houses which labelled themselves by such enticing titles as the "Royal English Chop House" and the "Margate Bar." Some, more accommodating still, announced in their windows that "Messrs. the Britannic tourists who arrive furnished with their own provisions may eat them here gratuitously." Could the Entente go further? I had 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. 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 it was a real pleasure to find oneself in fairly intimate relations with them, and to be of any service to them that one could.

The good Monsignore hardly ever returned from his many absences without bringing a friend or two with him; and his great recreation at this time was driving his guests about in a fine motor (a new toy) which he had lately bought from his nephew Fritz Ponsonby, the King's equerry. Fritz and his charming wife stayed with us this autumn, as did also our host's brother, Colonel Hegan Kennard, who was considerably the older, but much the more vigorous and energetic of the two.[[8]] He attended service on Sunday at the Evangelical church close by, and came back indignant. "By George, sir, I never saw anything so slovenly and slipshod in my life; disgraceful, sir, positively disgraceful!" I took him to hear Mrs. Garrett-Fawcett speak at a woman-suffrage debate at the Union—a most plausible lady, but we voted against her by a large majority. I found the motor an agreeable means of visiting various places of interest in the neighbourhood—Dorchester Abbey, an epitome of architecture from Early Norman to Late Perpendicular, but the interior spoilt by the bad taste of the Ritualistic fittings; the grand old Augustinian minster of Burford; and Cuddesdon, a miniature cathedral, with its western porch and massive central tower. It was over this porch that the ladies of Cuddesdon, in years gone by, wishing to do honour on some feast-day to their beloved diocesan Samuel Wilberforce, and not less beloved Archdeacon Alfred Pott, displayed their joint initials wrought in evergreens. "S.O.A.P.," read the Bishop as he paused before the western gable. "Surely an enemy hath done this," he sorrowfully muttered, and proceeded on his way.

An excursion or two from Oxford I remember this autumn: one to Downside, where it was always a happiness to go and spend a church-festival with my Benedictine brethren; another to Eton, where I gazed with dismay on the new school-hall with its unsightly dome, and wondered if this was really the best the Committee of Taste could achieve by way of South African War Memorial.[[9]] I met afterwards quite a contingent of Scotsmen (Arthur Hay, the Duke of Roxburghe's brother, etc.) at luncheon with the Irish Guards at Victoria Barracks, where I used to breakfast of a Sunday morning—a dissipation forbidden, I believe, to modern Etonians—with an uncle in the Scots Fusilier Guards, in my own school days. I went to London that evening to dine with, and read afterwards a paper on "Jerusalem of To-day" to, the Guild of SS. Gregory and Luke, my host being Sir John Knill, Sheriff of London, who was two years later to occupy the civic chair, as his excellent father had done before him. On another evening I attended our Westminster Dining-club, to hear Fr. R. H. Benson read us an essay on "The Value of Fiction"—interesting, as coming from a successful novelist, and of course brilliant; but I agreed with only about half of it.

Ninian Crichton Stuart had engaged me to go and support him at the St. Andrew's Day banquet of the Caledonian Society of Cardiff, the suffrages of which city he was at that time wooing as Conservative candidate, much assisted by his clever and charming wife. I stayed with them at their pretty home near Llandaff, and we motored in to the patriotic banquet, which began at 6.30 and lasted nearly five hours! I proposed the principal toast, and had of course no difficulty in showing (as one of the newspaper reports remarked) that all the chief posts in the Empire—political, ecclesiastical, legal and administrative, were, with the most insignificant exceptions, held by Scotsmen. Bagpipes, of course, skirled and whisky flowed freely; and the national enthusiasm reached its height when the haggis was borne round the hall in procession, carried by the white-clad chef and preceded by the pipe-major, playing his best and loudest in honour of the "chief of pudding race." I left Llandaff next morning, Ringan, Lady Ninian's pretty baby, crowing good-bye to me from his mother's arms,[[10]] and spent an hour or two in Cardiff with Bishop Hedley, who expressed his hope that I would help Kennard at Oxford as long as I could, and would ultimately succeed him as chaplain. We visited together the new and splendid town-hall, the finest municipal building I had ever seen. The Oxford term ended in the following week, and I made my way north to Fort Augustus, where I found discussion in progress as whether we should or should not sell our house and estate of Ardachie, for which we had several good offers. I said yes; for the place, though not without its attractions, had been altogether more of a burden than a profit to us for a good many years.[[11]] Whilst at Fort Augustus, I addressed, by desire of the community, letters to the Abbot-Primate in Rome, as well as to our own bishop, urging, for many weighty reasons, the reincorporation of our abbey into the English Benedictine Congregation, from which it had been separated for just twenty-six years.

[[1]] Parodied in Punch (I think by that inveterate punster the then editor, F. C. Burnand), under the titles of Goeth Down as an Oyster and Red in the Nose is She. It is the Scottish hero of one of these romances, I forget which (I mean, of course, the original, not the parody), who shows his emotion at a critical moment by "cramming half a yard of yellow beard into his mouth!"

[[2]] The bag consisted of an assortment of miscellaneous fowl. Bute was at this period of his career something of the typical Briton whose idea of happiness, according to some French observer, is more or less summed up in the formula: "My friends, it is a fine day: let us go out and kill something!"

[[3]] In the preface to Rod, Root, and Flower. The passage was quite new to me.

[[4]] From the Boke of St. Albans (1486).

[[5]] An antique privilege of the kind would appeal irresistibly to Bute—tenaci propositi viro; he stuck to his guns, not only claiming the right of presentation, but actually exercising it at the next vacancy. I am not qualified to pronounce on the vexed question; but my experience is that in such matters the big man usually gets his way, and the smaller has to go to the wall. What was settled after Bute's death I know not. Anyhow—the last Lord of Falkland lies among the lilies in a war cemetery in France; and the memorial chapel in his park, near by the House of Falkland, was designed by the present laird of Myres.

[[6]] George Angus, for nearly a quarter of a century resident priest at St. Andrews, died there on St. Patrick's Day (March 17), 1909.

[[7]] Less pleasing was it to notice the outside walls and very doors of the old church plastered all over with flaring affiches of music-hall performances, pictures of ballet-dancers, etc. "Cette canaille de République!" murmured in my ear, as we drove off, my friend and host, whose sympathies were entirely with the ancien régime.

[[8]] More of a man, in short. "Dear old Charlie," he said to me, "was good at games when he was at Harrow, and a capital runner. All the same, he was always a bit of an old woman, and always will be!"

[[9]] I wrote, I fear, rather heatedly to good old Ainger (Secretary of the War Fund), on what seemed to me the painful incongruity of the building with its surroundings. "Many people, I believe," he replied with admirable restraint, "feel quite as you do on this matter; but no one has expressed himself quite so strongly!"

[[10]] Poor little Ringan! (his name was the ancient "pet" form of "Ninian," the saint of Galloway). On the election-day, a year or so afterwards, the burgesses of Cardiff smiled to see him driving through the streets in a motor from which flew a bannerette recommending them to "Vote for Daddy!" There was universal regret, a few days later, at the sad news that the little electioneerer had succumbed to a chill caught on the occasion of his first public appearance, when less than two years old. See post. page [176].

[[11]] The actual tenant, Colonel Campbell, whose wife was a Catholic, eventually bought the property.