at all!_ So here I am
spending Christmas Eve in the trenches--like my father did exactly 60
years ago in the Crimea.[9] Only I think I am a good bit more
comfortable than he was at that time. I used to be up at cockcrow
when a small child on Christmas Day, to see what Santa Claus had
brought me, and I shall be up early enough to-morrow in all conscience
too, but for a different reason--standing to arms--so that I shall not
get my throat cut. The news of troubles in Berlin looks encouraging.
However, one must not build too much on that, but I have great hopes
of Hungary and Austria coming out of the war. To-day I have been round
my new trenches; only half of them are new, though, and, as usual, are
swimming in liquid mud. One of the men there had to be carried away
with his eye knocked out by a bullet which had come through the
parapet. Again my casualties for killed and wounded you can find by
multiplying the number of your uncle's house in Dublin by three, and
then subtracting ten from the total. [This number would be 98.] I
suppose our sick are more than twice that amount. Best of love to you
for Christmas. Whilst you are in church I shall be in the trenches,
but both doing our rightful duty, I trust.

Yours ever,
G.B.L.

As to school for Hal, you have done quite rightly. Mrs. Napier has a
pet school for boys, kept by a cousin of hers, I fancy, that ought to
be a fairly useful one.

G.B.L.

"CHRISTMAS IN THE CRIMEA.

"HOW IT WAS CELEBRATED NEAR BALACLAVA IN 1854.

"BY LIEUT.-GENERAL LAURIE, C.B., M.P.

"In some of his Christmas annuals Charles Dickens delighted to portray
the misanthropic grumbler who hated to see others enjoy themselves,
and always laid himself out to be especially miserable at Christmas
time, exaggerating the effects of the season by assuming a frozen
aspect, and like an iceberg, chilling all around him; yet as the same
iceberg when swept into the Gulf Stream finds the surrounding air and
water by which it is enveloped will not admit its retaining its frigid
isolation, it gradually melts and mixes with the warmer current, so
Dickens brought his surly and crabbed man in contact with those who
had set themselves to see everything under its brightest aspect, and
under these softening influences he gradually thaws out and becomes
the m