but I found a few in Oban,
on whom I called to secure their votes for Home Rule.

To hear Mass on the spot made sacred by the feet of our great Irish
saint, in the building, then a ruin, erected by his successors to
replace that which he himself had raised here as a centre of his great
missionary labours, was an experience to treasure until one's latest
day. What made the celebration the more memorable was the sermon in
Gaelic by Bishop MacDonald of Argyll and the Isles. I had the pleasure,
after Mass, of having dinner with him, and some most interesting
conversation.

I told him I had read with great interest a pastoral of his, issued some
five years before, in which he said that an interesting peculiarity of
his diocese, in respect of which it stood almost alone in the country,
was that its Catholicity was almost exclusively represented by districts
which had always clung to the faith, places where in the Penal days no
priest dared show himself in public, but visited the Catholic centres in
turn as a layman by night and gathered the children together to instruct
them as far as he was able. This was, he said, of extraordinary interest
on a day like that, when we were specially honouring the memory of the
great saint who had sown the seeds which had continued to bear fruit
through so many centuries. We also spoke of the singular fact that he
had that day preached on the spot on which St. Columba himself had
stood, and in the same language that he spoke, a language which had been
in existence long before the present English tongue was spoken. As
showing that the Scottish and Irish Gaelic were practically the same, as
distinguished from the Celtic tongue spoken by the Welsh and Bretons,
Bishop MacDonald told me he could read quite easily a book printed in
the Irish characters.

As a bye-election brought me to the sacred scene of the labours of our
great Irish saint, Columba, so did another bye-election bring me to the
spot where a martyr for Ireland suffered in 1798--Father O'Coigly. There
was a bye-election at Maidstone, where the martyr priest had been tried
for treason, and near it is Pennenden Heath, where he was executed, so
that both places will for ever be held sacred by patriotic Irishmen.
Besides securing a pledge for Home Rule from one of the candidates, and
organising the small Irish vote in his favour, I took the opportunity of
inaugurating a movement for the erection of a memorial to Father
O'Coigly. With