Certainly the beef was a little tough, as the hapless heifer had only been sacrificed on the previous day, and then there was no horse-radish and very little gravy; but the geese were first-rate. Like everything else in Asia Minor, they were evidently of great antiquity. Probably they had seen the former siege of Erzeroum; but age, which weakens most other things, had strengthened their limbs and steeled their muscles, until to disintegrate the closely knitted tissues was a veritable feat of strength, and one swallowed a mouthful with the comfortable glow of satisfaction that follows the surmounting of a desperate difficulty. Of the mince-pies I cannot speak with certainty, for Woods had taken complete control over the manufacture of these delicious delicacies, and, much as I respected my colleague, I was suspicious of his ingredients. I can testify, however, from the simple experience of lifting one up from the dish that the mince-pies were solid and weighty additions to the _menu_. I waited with some anxiety for the pudding, and the happiness that the artist feels in a work completed came over me as I saw old Tom Rennison bearing in the dish containing the pudding, surrounded by leaping tongues of blue flame from the burning brandy. Up to this period the Hungarian doctors had been politely complimentary, and had accepted slabs of heifer's flesh as hard as boot leather and chunks of goose that would have made excellent ammunition for siege artillery as typical dishes of a correct English dinner. By dint of washing the food down with plenty of wine and many tumblers of brandy-and-water, they struggled along gamely through the first courses; but when they received their portions of the plum pudding they distinctly jibbed. With the flames playing round its charred, excoriated surface, it certainly had a diabolical look, and it held together with a glutinous consistency that for an appreciable number of seconds defied the attack even of a carving-knife. The Hungarian doctors viewed their plates with an alarmed suspicion that was too genuine to be concealed, and I must confess that when I got a spoonful of my masterpiece into my mouth the taste did not compensate in the least for the difficulty of detaching the fragment from the surrounding bed-rock. That was the first and last time that I cooked a plum pudding. In spite of these little drawbacks, however, we all thoroughly enjoyed our Christmas dinner, and we made a fair hole in Mr. Zohrab's cellar, which was well stocked with wines and spirits and also with beer and porter. The dawn was coming up over the snow on the distant hills when we separated, laughing, singing, and wishing each other a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Within a fortnight nearly every one of us was down with typhus, and within a month more than half of our number were dead.