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You are not going to hear the eight stories. Mr. Dickens was not there; nor, indeed, was I. But a jolly Christmas dinner they had; though they had not those eight stories. Quiet they were, and very, very happy. It was a strange thing,–if one could have analyzed it,–that they should have felt so much at home, and so much at ease with each other, in that queer Virginian kitchen, where the doctor and his friends of his mess had arranged the feast. It was a happy thing, that the recollections of so many other Christmas homes should come in, not sadly, but pleasantly, and should cheer, rather than shade the evening. They felt off soundings, all of them. There was, for the time, no responsibility. The strain was gone. The gentlemen were glad to be dining with ladies, I believe: the ladies, unconsciously, were probably glad to be dining with gentlemen. The officers were glad they were not on duty; and the prisoner, if glad of nothing else, was glad he was not in bed. But he was glad for many things beside. You see it was but a little post. They were far away; and they took things with the ease of a detached command.

“Shall we have any toasts?” said the doctor, when his nuts and raisins and apples at last appeared.

“Oh, no! no toasts,–nothing so stiff as that.”

“Oh, yes! oh, yes!” said Grace. “I should like to know what it is to drink a toast. Something I have heard of all my life, and never saw.”

“One toast, at least, then,” said the doctor. “Colonel Bartlett, will you name the toast?”

“Only one toast?” said Horace; “that is a hard selection: we must vote on that.”

“No, no!” said a dozen voices; and a dozen laughing assistants at the feast offered their advice.

“I might give ‘The Country;’ I might give ‘The Cause;’ I might give ‘The President:’ and everybody would drink,” said Horace. “I might give ‘Absent friends,’ or ‘Home, sweet home;’ but then we should cry.”

“Why do you not give ‘The trepanned people’?” said Worster, laughing, “or ‘The silver-headed gentlemen’?”

“Why don’t you give ‘The Staff and the Line’?” “Why don’t you give ‘Here’s Hoping’?” “Give ‘Next Christmas.'” “Give ‘The Medical Department; and may they often ask us to dine!'”

“Give ‘Saints and Sinners,'” said Major Barthow, after the first outcry was hushed.

“I shall give no such thing,” said Horace. “We have had a lovely dinner; and we know we have; and the host, who is a good fellow, knows the first thanks are not to him. Those of us who ever had our heads knocked open, like the Major and me, do know. Fill your glasses, gentlemen; I give you ‘the Special Diet Kitchen.'”

He took them all by surprise. There was a general shout; and the ladies all rose, and dropped mock courtesies.

“By Jove!” said Barthow to the Colonel, afterwards, “It was the best toast I ever drank in my life. Anyway, that little woman has saved my life. Do you say she did the same to you?”

III.

CHRISTMAS AGAIN.

So you think that when the war was over Major Barthow, then Major-General, remembered Huldah all the same, and came on and persuaded her to marry him, and that she is now sitting in her veranda, looking down on the Pamunkey River. You think that, do not you?

Well! you were never so mistaken in your life. If you want that story, you can go and buy yourself a dime novel. I would buy “The Rescued Rebel;” or, “The Noble Nurse,” if I were you.

After the war was over, Huldah did make Colonel Barthow and his wife a visit once, at their plantation in Pocataligo County; but I was not there, and know nothing about it.

Here is a Christmas of hers, about which she wrote a letter; and, as it happens, it was a letter to Mrs. Barthow.

HULDAH ROOT TO AGNES BARTHOW.

VILLERS-BOCAGE, Dec. 27, 1868.