I hope you are getting the letters I send you from time to time. I got one admirable batch of letters from you by way of birthday present--they came on the day after my birthday. Perhaps I’ll get another batch for Christmas--it’s December 17th now, and we should receive another mail soon. I hope to send you a photograph soon. I believe personal pictures may be sent through the mail. It will be a beautiful sight. I got a Sing Sing haircut recently and am growing a corsair moustache. This is the pleasantest war I ever attended--nothing to do but fall in, fall out, pound a typewriter 13 hours a day and occasionally hike across France and back carrying a piano. However, I do really enjoy it, and the work is different in kind from newspaper work, and so a rest from it. By the way, I sent you some time ago a poem called “_Militis Meditatio_.” Please send a copy of it to a magazine and tell them to send the check for it to you. I hope to be able to do some writing as soon as we get settled and I get some of my statistical work out of the way. You ought to get your allotment this month, with additions from the Government (I hope you and the children are not yet in the poorhouse, or at any rate that you have struck a comfortable poorhouse). Send me pictures of yourself and the children, especially Deborah. I have made a nuisance of myself telling my bored friends about her intelligence in naming her doll “Hugh and Mrs. Leamy.” Also send me some tobacco, enough to fill a bedsack (also love me as intensely as possible; I love you more than ever before and think of you all the while).... * * * * * Christmas Eve. The enclosed clippings may amuse you--after you read them you’d better send them to Bob Holliday. They came with a raft of letters a couple of days ago. It’s very nice the way feasts seem to be marked--I last heard from you just before my birthday, and I got three letters from you by way of Christmas present. There must be a lot of parcels awaiting me, judging from information in your letters and those of my father and mother. We may get the packages to-night, in which case I’ll have some hours hard work, for all the Adjutant’s office helps in assorting mail. But I don’t think the packages will come until after Christmas. I suppose that you and the children are in New Brunswick now, and will go to Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s and pray for a vagrant verse-maker who is trying to be a soldier. We may have a Midnight Mass in the church here to-night. Fr. Duffy has had a choir practising for it, and we possess a tenor soloist. He is an Italian, a barber when not singing or soldiering.