Sometimes, as the other day, we are allowed to take down the bob-sleighs we have made to a hill about a mile away, and pretend we are schoolboys again. After snowballing the starters and getting snowballed ourselves, we shot down the slope or over the bank, as the case occurred, and once or twice we collided, but no one got seriously hurt. The hard toiling uphill again, pulling the sleigh, proved how unfit we were. On the way home we religiously snowballed every fowl we passed, and the roads are full of them. The days are dreadfully dreary, and it is only these events that seem to lighten the monotonous gloom. Firewood is very scarce and expensive, and only on rare occasions do we have a fire worth anything. If we do by chance have wood it is often wet, and the wretched tin stoves choke the place with smoke. I half decided to have a stove in my bedroom, but, besides that being fearfully small, the trouble is to get wood, which comes in tiny donkey loads at fictitious prices. So we lie in bed under the clothes, and with the intense cold sleep steals over us. There is the same difficulty in getting kerosene, now five shillings a bottle, and what one gets either goes out, or splutters until you kick it out. We hibernate, therefore. Once or twice it has been so cold that I have gone down to the kitchen and sat by the smoke heap there. This is very popular these days. Letters are turning up more regularly. I am delighted to have at last heard from home and several friends all over the world, including the brilliant author of "Problems of Philosophy." He has very kindly sent me some books and recommends me to see Schiller on "Grumps." I also heard from Wallace, from whom I have not heard for years and years, and to whom I wrote in Kut along with people in the neglected recesses of my memory, but the letter, of course, was never sent. It must be eleven years since he and I sat on the golden sand of a green-vestured island in that silvery sea around Auckland--smoking our pipes as we lay on our backs, and filling in with a wish what we wanted to complete the scene. I remember wanting the suitable girl, but he wanted books and debate. In between are my world travels, and Cambridge, and Germany, and now I've been running about in a war, and he, since a professor in Princetown, writes to condole with me at being out of the war so early! He ought to congratulate me on my luck in staying in it so long. But then, of course, he can't know anything about Kut yet. It seems I have been reported dead in Kut, and again on the trek, and in England they are only just hearing to the contrary. What an unnecessary suspense for one's people! Mine have been magnificent, even throughout the long period of tragic rumour. About my other friends at Cambridge, and in the regiment, and in France, I never hear a word.