OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Friday, Dec. 28th, 1860._ MY DEAR MARY, I cannot tell you how much I thank you for the beautiful cigar-case, and how seasonable, and friendly, and good, and warm-hearted it looked when I opened it at Gad's Hill. Besides which, it is a cigar-case, and will hold cigars; two crowning merits that I never yet knew to be possessed by any article claiming the same name. For all of these reasons, but more than all because it comes from you, I love it, and send you eighteen hundred and sixty kisses, with one in for the new year. Both excellent stories and perfectly new. Your Joe swears that he never heard either--never a word or syllable of either--after he laughed at 'em this blessed day. I have no news, except that I am not quite well, and am being doctored. Pray read "Great Expectations." I think it is very droll. It is a very great success, and seems universally liked. I suppose because it opens funnily, and with an interest too. I pass my time here (I am staying here alone) in working, taking physic, and taking a stall at a theatre every night. On Boxing Night I was at Covent Garden. A dull pantomime was "worked" (as we say) better than I ever saw a heavy piece worked on a first night, until suddenly and without a moment's warning, every scene on that immense stage fell over on its face, and disclosed chaos by gaslight behind! There never was such a business; about sixty people who were on the stage being extinguished in the most remarkable manner. Not a soul was hurt. In the uproar, some moon-calf rescued a porter pot, six feet high (out of which the clown had been drinking when the accident happened), and stood it on the cushion of the lowest proscenium box, P.S., beside a lady and gentleman, who were dreadfully ashamed of it. The moment the house knew that nobody was injured, they directed their whole attention to this gigantic porter pot in its genteel position (the lady and gentleman trying to hide behind it), and roared with laughter. When a modest footman came from behind the curtain to clear it, and took it up in his arms like a Brobdingnagian baby, we all laughed more than ever we had laughed in our lives. I don't know why. We have had a fire here, but our people put it out before the parish-engine arrived, like a drivelling perambulator, with _the beadle in it_, like an imbecile baby. Popular opinion, disappointed in the fire having been put out, snowballed the beadle. God bless it! Over the way at the Lyceum, there is a very fair Christmas piece, with one or two uncommonly well-done nigger songs--one remarkably gay and mad, done in the finale to a scene. Also a very nice transformation, though I don't know what it means.