Once,’ says Canon Dimnet, ‘I heard a shepherd saying that “the wind sat in France,”’ for the Canon was born in that frontier district of his country that was formerly part of the old Middle Kingdom of Lotharingia and later of the Duchy of Burgundy. Dimnet is a Frenchman born and bred; in My Old World he has created an unforgettable picture of the typical small town that was his birthplace, Trélon, with its gray spire dominating the flat landscape; but though the life of Trélon is French, its memories are of older allegiance, and the shepherd was recording in his phrase a time when, to the inhabitants of Trélon and all about Cambrai, the French were ‘foreigners.’

It is perhaps not too fanciful to see in this frontier background an explanation of Canon Dimnet’s extraordinary feeling for a language and a culture not his own. An uncle early taught him ‘simple English words; door, window, pen, book . . . and had given our dog quite a standing in the street by calling him, for some reason, Euston.’ The little flame lighted by his uncle grew during school days until at last, on going to teach at Douai, Ernest Dimnet came into contact with the English Benedictine community in that town. The effect upon him was startling. Even in their Catholicism they betrayed a new world: ‘I used to think my Benedictine friends, monks though they were, even more unclerical than I was.