peeped into but one department of the great hospital that he is supporting? But really, on a Christmas Day one shouldn't be thinking about these things; and you must put them down to an elderly garrulity, or as being, if you will, in the nature of a half-sorrowful farewell. For by next Christmas, alas, my wards will have ceased to know me. The twenty years' span allotted to me will have come to its close; and even to-day, at a corner of the corridor, I overheard a hazarded guess at my successor. So after a long pilgrimage through gay and chattering wards--they were all gay this afternoon, only you mustn't look, perhaps, at those quiet corners--we at last found Esther and her party in the gayest of them all. I will call it this, as being a very complete disguise if you should ever quote me to the Sister of another. And here a troupe of residents was delivering a little series of songs and dances, to the complete delight of some forty patients and a background of visitors and nurses. Its members were particularly hilarious. I fancy indeed that they must have primed themselves with a little previous champagne--a very little, and you must remember that at least two of them had been up for most of the night. But nobody noticed this; and Claire, at any rate, was very thoroughly taken by storm. "Won't they come back presently?" she asked. But the Sister shook her head. If Claire wanted to see them again she must go off to some other ward. I saw her turn to Tom. "Shall we?" she said, and they slipped away together. But before they went I heard her calling his particular attention to one of the players, "the second from the left," she whispered, "the awfully handsome one"--a new note for Claire? Yes, just a little new. And so we left it at last, driving out into the street through a small crowd of eager, white-faced children, for some of whom, no doubt, its walls were as the walls of Paradise. It was quite dark, with a blur of rain upon the carriage windows; and for a minute or two the hospital, with its long rows of lighted wards, towered dimly upon our left. "Just like a great big liner," said Claire, who had been down to Southampton when Molly and Rupert sailed. And so indeed one could imagine it--lifting its strong sides above all these crowded roof-tops, with unshaken bows, and Hope upon the bridge, and Comfort, at least, to minister in its cabins. "And yet there's something awful in it too," said Jeanie Graham. "Chiefly," explained Horace philosophically, "because we're going home ourselves to an excellent Christmas dinner." "And happen to be feeling rather well," said Esther. "And partly, I suppose," added Jeanie, "because just now we're looking at it from the outside." "And a little bit," I guessed, "because it stands, in a sense, for Knowledge with a big K. And there are times when we're all rather afraid of that--even when it wants to do us good." "But we run to it in the end," smiled Jeanie.