We have had some wonderfully jolly Christmases. My four children and their cousin, Walker Blaine Beale, took on themselves the loving burden of our entertainment. A play was sometimes written or charades improvised, for which upstairs closets were ransacked for costumes and other paraphernalia in such haste and amid such ruthless confusion that Minna, our old Swedish nurse, who has been in our family since the birth of my oldest daughter, would often throw up her hands in horror at the bedrooms, which indeed looked as if a tornado had swept over them. I remember a delicious take-off on “Pelléas et Mélisande” which my oldest daughter, Alice, wrote. I had given a number of lecture recitals on the opera the previous season and it was much in the family mind. Then another year a drama on “The North Pole” was written. This was just after the dispute between Peary and Cook as to the discovery of the pole. There was a real shiver when we were heralded back to our transformed parlor. The Christmas tree had quickly become a lonely pine outlined against bleak areas of farthest north cotton sheets, stretching in all directions over “hummocks” of sofas and chairs. Our five children, for Walker seemed as much our very own in these celebrations as my own four girls, gave us a wonderfully spirited drama of the conquest of the polar regions! I can see and hear dear David Bispham laugh, my old friends Doctor and Mrs. George Harris’s enthusiasm, Margaret Anglin, Julie Faversham. . . . Our happy, happy Christmases! The last Christmas party at our home was that of 1916. Then in 1917 Walker was training at Camp Dix and we all went out with his mother and spent Christmas Day at an inn near by to which he could come. There was a rumor everywhere that his regiment was to embark for overseas in a few days, although he really did not sail until May. We all did our best to make it gay in that hotel dining-room, the rain falling dismally. We were so proud of our young khaki-uniformed lieutenant! My Polly played and played, rags, anything and everything, on the old hotel piano. We did not know it was to be our last happy Christmas together, but war had already given to joy a kind of yearning anguish. My nephew was killed the 18th of the following September, 1918, at Saint-Mihiel. Reconnoitring to assure the safety of his men, he leaped a fence to join three fellow officers. A shell tore them to pieces. This was in the early afternoon. Walker was taken to a field hospital and died at eleven that night. We know that he did not suffer very much, and we think we know that he never understood how severely he was wounded, that he never knew that what, as a soldier, he so freely offered had been accepted. He was his grandfather’s, Mr. Blaine’s, youngest grandson, only twenty-two, his mother’s only son, our brightest and best. There is no day we do not think of him, but Christmas, the day of giving, is his own especial day.