"This is to a man you've never met. He's a private at the Front and his name is Mackinnon." "'Dear Mr. Mackinnon'--that's how I should begin. Do we want to say anything particular, or are we just trying the new notepaper?" Mrs. Jeremy put down her work and gave herself up to explanation. Private Mackinnon was in a school friend's husband's regiment, and he never got any letters or parcels from anybody, and the friend's husband had asked his wife to ask her friends---- "Wait a bit," said Jeremy. "We shall want the College of Heralds in this directly." He took out his pencil and drew up a pedigree:-- School. | +-------+------+ | | J.P.S.=Mrs. J. Friend=Officer. | Regiment. | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | | | | | | | | | Mackinnon. "There you are. Now _you_ think it's J. P. S.'s turn to write to Mackinnon." He drew a line from one to the other. "Very well; I shall tell him about the old school." "You do see, don't you?" said Mrs. Jeremy. "All the others get letters and things from their friends, and poor Mr. Mackinnon gets nothing. Katharine wants to get up a surprise for him, and she's asking half-a-dozen of her friends to send him things and write him jolly letters." She picked up the muffler she had been knitting. "This is for him, and I said you'd do the letter. You write such jolly ones." Jeremy threw away the end of his cigar and got up. "Yes, but what about?" he said, running his hand through his hair. "This is going to be very difficult." "Oh, just one of your nice funny letters like you write to me." "Quite like that?" said Jeremy earnestly. "Well, not quite like that," smiled Mrs. Jeremy; "but you know what I mean. He'd love it." "Very well," said Jeremy, "we'll see what we can do." He withdrew to his library and got to work. "_My dear Mr. Mackinnon_," he wrote, "_the weather here is perfectly beastly_." He looked at it thoughtfully and then put it on one side. "We won't destroy it," he said to himself, "because we may have to come back to it, but at present we don't like it." He began another sheet of paper. "_My dear Mackinnon, who do you think it is? Your old friend Jeremy Smith!_" He murmured it to himself three or four times, crossed out "old" and put "new," and then placed this sheet on the top of the other. "_My dear Mackinnon, yesterday the Vicar_----" "I knew it would be difficult," he said, and took a fourth sheet. Absently he began to jot down a few possible openings:-- "_I am a Special Constable ..._" "_Have you read Mrs. Humphry Ward's latest ..._" "_I hope the War won't last long ..._" "Yes," he said, "but we're not being really funny enough." He collected his letters as far as they had gone and took them to his wife.