At this time we lost the services of Mr. Zohrab, the consul; for after the fall of Kars, Lord Derby, desiring to avoid any complications in the event of the Russians occupying Erzeroum, instructed the British consul to retire at once to Constantinople. Mr. Zohrab and his wife and sons accordingly left the town, much to our regret, for they had been very helpful to us. When he went, however, he handed over to us his house, which was fully provisioned, amply supplied with fuel, and provided with a well stocked cellar. We took possession at once, and after the poor kind of way in which we had been living our new quarters were most luxurious. Although we personally were much better off than before, yet the condition of the bulk of the people in the town was getting steadily worse every day. Stores of every kind were getting scarce, and Kurd Ismael Pasha, who replaced Mukhtar Pasha as commander-in-chief when that officer was ordered to Constantinople, had a difficult task in administration. Towards the end of December it became necessary to relieve the town of a portion of the population, and an expedition consisting of four hundred men and two hundred women and children was ordered to start for Erzinghan, a town which was supposed to be five days' journey distant from Erzeroum. This march rivalled in its horrors the march of the wounded men from Kars; for before the expedition had gone a day's journey from Erzeroum a fearful snowstorm swept down upon the hapless creatures, and when the miserable remnant had dragged themselves back to their starting-point it was found that of the two hundred women and children not a single soul remained. All died where they fell, including the wife of the colonel commanding the expedition, and were buried under the drifting heaps of snow that the wind piled high over the uncoffined remains. Of the soldiers who got back to Erzeroum the greater number perished from frostbite, dysentery, and exposure. It was an awful holocaust. In spite of fever and dysentery, gunshot wounds in horrible variety and septic disease in every hospital, so strangely is the Anglo-Saxon mind constituted that we decided to "enjoy ourselves" at Christmas, although the Russians were practically knocking at our gates. My previous Christmas dinner consisted of a handful of maize cobs eaten in solitude on the ice-bound road to Orkhanieh. During the intervening year I had lived and worked and suffered much--and almost to my own astonishment I was still alive. So here at Erzeroum I proposed to have a Christmas festivity, and Pinkerton, Denniston, and Woods eagerly accepted the suggestion. We decided to invite all the European doctors in the town, and to give them a real English Christmas dinner, for which great preparations had to be made.