One of the finest churches stands on the border of Portianus, the village that was nearest to our Sarpi camp. It is richly decorated with a profusion of Apostles, Saints, and scenes from Biblical history on walls and roof. The altar stands beyond a screen as wide as the building, fairly overcrowded with symbolic paintings. The sanctuary was filled daily with soldiers, who placed baksheesh in the plate as they emerged past the old priest, smiling a Benediction at the door. Those who could make anything of it crowded round the fine black-letter vellum Greek Bible at the reading-desk--a treasure indeed. The rest made an attempt at transliteration of the titles daubed beneath the pictures of the Saints. (Most men on Lemnos acquired at least a nodding-acquaintance with the Greek alphabet.) The old priest had little English, but he was very willing to make a shot at exegesis upon the Biblical pictures. There was an enormously large group of them at the door of exit. He liked best to explicate, in his broken English, a painting of the Last Judgment--God, a stout and irascible-looking old gentleman sitting aloft upon the bench, with the Head-Saints about him, suspending above a mortal the scales of Justice; on the right the gaping mouth of hell, belching flame, and Satan uprising from the heat; on the left the golden gate of heaven, with St. Peter graciously admitting one of the approved, and a condemned wretch cowering towards Hell.... The realism of it appealed to the priest's powers of exposition. The others he passed over with a mere cursory indication of the subject. He was a genial old man--genial even when he took us out to the sepulchral yard behind the church and showed the vaults of departed parishioners, with the bones deposited upon the slabs. Christmas came upon us in Lemnos. There was leisure to be unreservedly merry, and that was much. The Billies came a couple of days before. No one who does not remember well the unloading of Christmas stockings can have a notion of the merriment that was abroad. Santa Claus is not dead. Had the evacuation been timed a little later he would have visited the trenches. As it was, he came out of the mythological past as another Greek god to Lemnos. And the Greeks, in the whole gamut of their worship, never evolved a deity more beneficent. Psychologists may debate the point whether Santa Claus, had he visited Australians in the trenches, would have brought a keener zest of enjoyment with his gifts than in the quiet of Lemnos. But the luxury of appreciation of all things Christmas was upon the Australians at rest on this beautiful island, and what is certain is that had the blessed donors seen the distribution and the opening-up they could have had no more precious reward. The Peninsula would have offered a sharper contrast of enjoyment, but less leisure to enjoy. On the whole, it was probably a good thing that we got our Billies during a respite.