As I was standing this morning with Florence in our sadly diminished and attenuated store cupboard she said in her simple direct way, "Do you notice that every day there is a little less, something else we have to do without?" It was apropos of the plum puddings and the mincemeat, now due to be made, but for which there are no ingredients. A good many households in England and Scotland depended upon our Christmas puddings. I hate to have them go short, but diplomatic relations being what they are with Tino of Greece, we have no currants. It is thus we visualise and realise the intimate discomfort of a world at war. It has all to be cheerfully faced, however, and we talked substitutes for a good half hour, and there will be a pudding of some sort to go forth to the waiting households, though it will be minus the plums. Since I wrote you last I have been to Scotland. War has shaken the foundations of our Kingdom by the Sea. It has ceased to be a haven and become in very truth a coast defense. The cliffs bristle with guns, they have crept up from the fort, till the nearest one is over the garden wall not fifty yards away. There it stands with its gleaming nozzle to the sea, the gunners unsleeping night and day by its side. It has become horrible and menacing. Its old-world intimate charm, which belongs to simple places untouched by conventionality, has surely gone, forever sacrificed, as so much else has been, to the monster that has convulsed the world. When we could not keep the Boy we laid him here in the place he so loved—and it was a crumb of comfort in our sorrow to feel that if he had been given choice he would himself have chosen to sleep on the windy hill above the shore where in his childhood days he used to paddle with his fat brown legs, and his bucket gripped hard in his podgy little hands. As I sat there by his white cross on the windy hill and listened to the beat of the surf on the rocks below, I wondered what he was thinking of it all, and I felt glad that his dear dust was sleeping sweetly, his soul safe in the Father’s House. I think I must tell you here, my soul’s friend, of a strange story I have had sent to me from France, a story which affects me and mine. The Boy had his father’s genius for friendship, and clung to his chums with all the ardour of his nature. I lost sight of his chief one when Oxford swallowed him. In a busy life like mine there is not time to do all the things one wants to do. The garden of friendship even has to suffer through the lack of cultivation.