When we took over Mr. Zohrab's house, we also assumed a right title and interest in the services of two sturdy henchmen. One was old Tom Rennison, who had been dragoman for General Williams during the siege of Erzeroum thirty years before, and the other was an Armenian named Vachin. Tom Rennison, veteran campaigner as he was, had never seen mince-pies made, so to speak, under fire; and Vachin knew more about the preparation of pilaf than plum pudding. Consequently not only the arrangement of the _menu_, but the actual work of cooking it, devolved upon the medical staff; and I am sorry to say that, though by this time there were few things in surgery which we would not attempt, from disarticulation of a thumb to amputation of a thigh, nevertheless in the science of cooking we were painfully unlearned. Lister was an open book to us; but the dark sayings of Brillat-Savarin were as obscure as the Rig-Vedas. Pinkerton, Woods, and myself held a consultation over the plum pudding, which was intended to beget envy and jealousy in the hearts of the Austrian and Hungarian doctors, and to be a dazzling example of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon cooking over the unsubstantial kickshaws of continental cuisines. I noticed that Vachin, who was always an ill disposed fellow, looked undisguisedly contemptuous of our preparations, and that old Tom Rennison was obviously fluctuating between the extremes of hope and fear. It is not easy to recollect exactly what was in that pudding. Denniston had heard that suet was an ingredient of supreme importance, so the yellow fat was cut from the joint of beef which had been moving about the yard only two days before as the sirloin of Mr. Zohrab's best heifer. We found plenty of currants and raisins among the stores; but there was no candied peel, and the spices which had been imported from Teheran somehow smelt quite unlike the unconvincing substance that we remembered to have seen in our youth at the suburban grocer's. We had plenty of flour of course, and we mixed our _chef-d'œuvre_ in a big brown pot. It was a viscous, œdematous mass, of the consistency of soft indiarubber, when we had done mixing it, and it resembled nothing so much as a bucketful of Zante currants which had fallen by accident into a glue-pot. The other fellows made some very discouraging remarks; but I tied up the ghastly mixture in half a clean sheet, and sat up all night on Christmas Eve boiling it in the iron pot. On Christmas night we had a grand banquet, and about twenty other European doctors came in answer to our invitations to receive our hospitality. We explained to them at some length that we were going to give them a real English dinner, which was a treat that they had probably never enjoyed before, and very likely might never enjoy again.