To-night I want to tell you a bit about gifts and givers. All the mail for the nurses has to be brought to my office to be sorted again: some to be forwarded to English sisters or V. A. D.’s who have left, some to be taken out to be brought up to the Sick Sisters, some to be put away until those on leave return, and some to be hunted up on lists and forwarded if possible. A man brings the papers and packages in large sacks. Sometimes there have been three or four sacks full on the same day. He empties them on the floor and Miss Taylor and I sort it out. I wish you could see what we have had here on the floor. There have been jam, coffee beans, and pounds of ground coffee, lump sugar and granulated sugar, cocoa and chocolate by the pound, hard candies and soft candies, cookies, and fruit cake, chewing-gum, cigarettes, woolen underwear, shoes, knitted things, magazines without wrappings or covers, bits of glass bottles, letters without envelopes, talcum powder, Christmas cards “with love from Aunt Mary,” “Merry Christmas and don’t forget me,” from John H. Jones, Jr., Kansas City, or Roanoke, Va., and toothpaste. You just ought to see what a tube of pink toothpaste can do to a bag of mail, but the worst of all were the jam and the talcum powder. You would not believe that a large can of Colgate’s talcum powder could break right in two, but I have seen two of them broken clean through the middle. And as for the comfort bags for soldiers, you ought to see the way some of those have arrived, sans paper, sans string, together just because the things were in a bag and the address was tied to the bag string. Cardboard boxes never arrive intact. Tin containers get stove in. (I don’t know the past participle of that word, maybe it’s _stiven_.) If a tin box with sharp edges is nicely wrapped in paper, it is apt to arrive without the paper, which the sharp edges have worn through. Even wooden boxes are frequently broken. Everything is crushed and then of course the strings come off and the contents begin to shake out. The long, long journey is what does the damage, the many weeks of rubbing and shaking. A five-pound box of Maillard’s candy packed in a round tin box, arrived for me the other day without the cover of the tin box and with the cover of the inside box broken, the candy just protected by the tinfoil inside. But not a piece was missing. There really have been very few instances where we have not been able to identify the person for whom the package was meant, but sometimes, I can assure you it has taken considerable ingenuity.