And thus the months wore on, punctuated by laboriously written communications from Dick, with an occasional card from Mick, who kept more in the background. The great attraction, undoubtedly, was Dick. He entered into personal details, asked if the young lady had made the cakes herself. Here I understand cook was not too absorbed in her own relations to insist that full credit should be given to the right person; and Abigail wrote explaining that as she was very much occupied, and too busy to attend to the cooking, a friend who lived with her always made the cakes. Whereupon by return post _I_ received a sloping, heavy-downstroked letter of thanks from the dutiful Dick! On another occasion, Dick sent his photo (after being asked for it times out of number, I believe). It was not as satisfactory as it might have been, because it was an amateur snapshot group, and you know how easy it is to decipher the features when the hand camera has stood a quarter of a mile away (so as to include as much of the landscape as possible), and everyone’s face is in black shadow under a hat brim that has been tilted forward to exclude the full glare of the sun. Unfortunately he omitted to put a =X= against himself, and as there were a dozen men in the group all in slouch hats and farm attire (to say nothing of the women and children), there was little to help us! But he did say that, as Abigail had told him Canada was the one place above all others that she longed to see, and how she was hoping to go there as soon as the war was over, he had sent his picture taken on a Canadian farm. It was just a little gathering photographed on someone’s birthday. Still, as he hadn’t given us any help in the matter, we had to decide ourselves which was the lonely sailor (though, as Abigail commented, she couldn’t understand how, with such a large collection of friends, he could ever have come to be so alone in the world). We picked out a thin, anæmic-looking young man, who was standing beside a comfortable, matronly woman in a shady hat and a big apron; and as her age might have been anything from thirty to sixty, we decided she was his mother, and I remarked what a nice homely soul she looked in her checked apron, and no wonder he was devoted to her, and how proud she must be of the dear lad—all of which Abigail accepted as a personal compliment. * * * * * Winter gave way to spring, and in like rotation mince pies were superseded by Swiss roll (to make which eggs were struck off our breakfast menu), and marmalade replaced the figs and dates in the parcels that went out to some unknown spot on the world’s ocean-spaces, all of which our wonderful Navy now controls. Likewise, cretonne gave place to unbleached calico, my remnants being exhausted.