[[1]] The old man died in his hundredth year, after spending nearly a quarter of a century as a professed lay-brother in our abbey, whither he had come as a septuagenarian, by the advice of an episcopal cousin, to prepare for his end! See post, page [260].
[[2]] Our friendship had lasted uninterruptedly for nearly forty years, and had now extended to two generations of her descendants.
[[3]] "There was an old maid of Carstairs,
Whose villa required some repairs:
When she asked if the plumber
Could finish next summer,
He said he would be there for years!"
[[4]] My impression is that the "king of Britain" was a bit of a myth, and that the "Lucius" venerated at Chur was Saint Lucius of Glamorgan—called in Welsh "Lleurwg" or "Lleurfer Mawr"=the "Great Light-bearer," who, according to the Welsh tradition, was the founder of the Church of Llandaff and of others in South Wales.
[[5]] Sir William and some of his nearest relations formed a remarkable group of men who had won titles and honours in their various careers. His brother was created Baron Farrer; one brother-in-law was Sir Stafford Northcote, first Earl of Iddesleigh, and another was created Baron Hobhouse; his nephew was Lord Northcote, the first Governor-General of Australia; and he himself was given his knighthood at the first Jubilee of Queen Victoria.
[[6]] Three (of whom one, the destined Superior, unhappily died on the voyage out) were English nuns from Stanbrook Abbey, near Worcester: the remaining four were Brazilians, who had passed through their novitiate in the same convent.
[[7]] Our friendship had begun unconventionally. An anonymous article of mine, in a weekly paper, on my Eton schoolfellows, had mentioned Tom's father, Eustace Vesey, as "the dearest of them all." Tom, then himself a small Etonian, wrote to me through the publisher: I of course replied, and the friendship thus begun lasted through his school days, his rather meteoric time at Christ Church, and afterwards.
[[8]] Sister to my best and oldest Oxford friend, Willie Neville. Sir Arthur Bigge, private secretary successively to Queen Victoria, Edward VII., and George V., was raised to the peerage as Baron Stamfordham this year (1911).
[[9]] In the neighbourhood of Calgary. Nothing, however, came of the scheme.
[[10]] And domestic conditions, I may add, highly uncomfortable—far more so than in the prolonged strike some years later, for which people were more or less prepared. "I wonder, my lord," said a lady, visiting a bishop in his vast and unwarmed palace, "that you don't get some of that nice Welsh coal for your big house. I forget the exact name; I think it is called anti-christ coal!"