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The Christmas gala at Baskerville Hall began with bright electric lights welcoming guests to the ancestral home, great boughs of living green hanging everywhere, Holmes and I admiring the elegant diamond on Beryl's engagement ring, and Sir Henry's enormous spotted Great Dane Hugo trotting among the guests and head-butting his owners for ear-scratches. (This latter development delighted us both greatly, for it was proof greater than any doctor's proclamation that Sir Henry had recovered from his brutal ordeal.)
The Christmas Eve dinner was served, the feast presided over by the Barrymores and the staff of newly-hired servants they supervised. What a change this atmosphere was from the dreary dark old hall sullen with fear and murder in which Sir Henry, Dr. Mortimer and I had eaten with only Barrymore and his wife tending us.
After dinner came the games. The oldest of the parlour entertainments was also the most perilous, but fit the venerable old place perfectly: A cluster of raisins in a bowl of brandy, the whole thing set alight, and then the guests took turns trying to snatch the flaming raisins out of the bowl and throw them, still aflame, into their mouths. "A barbaric custom," said Sherlock Holmes, but joined in and laughed with me as we joined those who'd gotten their tongues more than a little burned.