And the dear old carols; their quaint rhymes set to music full of odd flourishes, familiar since the childish days when we lay wide awake on Christmas night, listening breathlessly to the voices in the distance, and doubting whether the 'angelick host' of which they sang could have made more melodious music. We were great at Christmas carols in Wyncliffe. Everybody that could sing--and some that only thought they could--went down to the schoolhouse, for the few weeks before Christmas, on the nights that the singers practised. Cuthbert and I had been 'waits' ever since we were little schoolboys, with small shrill voices that were always being left behind when the tune swept up suddenly to a high note far above our reach, or rolled down into a manly grumble somewhere in the very heart of the bass. Standing close together and singing with might and main, we could not hear our own voices, but could only see each other's mouths wide open. Our childish piping was buried out of hearing beneath the rude deep men's voices, and the clear notes of the women, the scraping flourishes of the fiddles, and the tones of the flute that whistled and stopped, and lost its way, and found it again, when nobody was expecting it, like a gust of wandering wind. Things improved for us as time passed on. I played the violin myself in these latter days, and for several years Cuthbert's voice made the fortune, and was the great boast, of the waits. It was a story often told, how a stranger, hearing us sing one Christmas night, turned out to be the organist of Morechester Minster, and wanted Cuthbert afterwards to join the choir of the great church. We did not wonder. It was but natural. What musician would not have wished for that sweet rich voice of his, that seemed to blend all the others together and bring them into harmony? Ah, well, that was the Christmas before Cuthbert went away. We had learnt to do without him now. Nevertheless, the carols, like many other things, were no longer quite what they used to be. Hildred and Matt Clifford and I had been round with the waits this year for several nights. It chanced that I was late in joining them on the evening of Christmas Day, and as I crossed the village green my father met and stopped me. 'I say, lad, you haven't heard the news.' There was light enough for me to see the strange, awed look on his face, and to feel that whatever the news was, it had shocked him, and made him half-unwilling, and yet eager, to tell it. Besides, he had just a shade of that triumph which people's faces wear when they have foretold that something has come to pass. 'That boy Cuthbert has got killed in the wars.' I stood still and stared at him. 'Yes, he has got killed, poor lad,' my father repeated. 'Esther Reynolds brought the news. Young Moore, over at the ferry, has come home, and she had it from him.'