The only event outside our own circle which I recall in the later months of 1913 was the solemn blessing of the new abbot of Douai (an old friend and fellow-novice of mine), at which I assisted in October. The ceremony and subsequent luncheon lasted for nearly five solid hours, and I began to think that I was getting too old for such protracted functions! though I found the monks of the Berkshire abbey, as always, most kind, considerate and hospitable. Staying at Keir on my way home, I found a big shooting-party assembled--Tullibardines, Elphinstones, Lovats, Shaw Stewarts and others. All day long they were banging at pheasants (how remote those days of battues seem in 1922!) and in the evening there were ghost-stories and music, Lady Tullibardine's piano-playing and singing (of very high quality indeed) giving especial pleasure to her hearers. On our national festival of St. Andrew I had the pleasure of admitting two novices to profession--the first ceremony of the kind since 1908. We kept also this month the "silver jubilee" of two of our fathers, of whom one had been born without an ear (in the musical sense), and had never sung mass in his life, but on this unique occasion chanted the Gospel as deacon. December brought wild and stormy weather, which did not, however, interfere with our customary activities; and many of our fathers were at this time out giving missions, or temporary assistance to invalided or absent priests. One of my Boyle nephews--a flying-man like his younger brother--was married this month {258} to the daughter of an Australian judge:[12] I could not be present, but telegraphed to him, "The best of luck to you on earth and in the air!" An unwelcome December visitant was an epidemic of gastric influenza, which prostrated some of our community for a week or two; but all were recovered, and most of our wanderers returned, for the Christmas festival--a real old-fashioned one as regarded the weather, with hard frost and snow lying seven inches deep. This was a rather unusual state of things at Fort Augustus, where the comparatively high temperature of Loch Ness (never known to freeze even in the hardest winters) seemed to affect the whole district.[13] Lochaber too, where winter is as a rule wild and wet rather than cold, was this year frostbound and snowed up; and our afternoon diversion, on a Sunday which I spent there, was to trudge a mile or two through the snow and see the red deer fed by hand--a pretty and unusual spectacle.