_26 December._--Went to the station. Oddly enough, very few wounded were
there, so I came away, and had my first day at home. I got a little
oil-stove put in my room, wrote letters, tidied up, and thoroughly
enjoyed myself.

A Taube came over and hovered above Furnes, and dropped bombs. I was at
the Villa, and the family of Joos and I stood and watched it, and a
nasty dangerous moth it looked away up in the sky. Presently it came
over our house, so we went down to the kitchen. A few shots were fired,
but the Taube was far too high up to be hit. Max, the Joos' cousin, went
out and "tirait," to the admiration of the women-kind, and then, of
course, "Papa" had to have a try. The two men, with their little gun and
their talk and gesticulations, lent a queer touch of comic opera to the
scene. The garden was so small, the men in their little hats were so
suggestive of the "broken English" scene on the stage, that one could
only stand and laugh.

[Page Heading: A BELGIAN DINNER-PARTY]

The Joos family are quite a study, and so kind. On Christmas Eve I dined
with them, and they gave me the best of all they had. There was a
pheasant, which someone had given the doctor (I fancy he is a very small
practitioner amongst the poor people); surely, never did a bird give
more pleasure. I had known of its arrival days before by seeing
Fernande, the little girl, decorated with feathers from its tail. Then
the good papa must be decorated also, and these small jokes delighted
the whole family to the point of ecstasy.

On Christmas Eve Monsieur Max conceived the splendid joke, carefully
arranged, of presenting Madame Joos--who is young and pretty--and the