306 THE BED MOUNTAIN OF ALASKA. 
abstracted therefrom to serve as gifts for the emigrants 
and train-men, to whose particular entertainment the 
evening was by common consent to be devoted. 
Just as the lamps were lighted in the train, our hero, 
who had disappeared early in the afternoon, returned, 
dragging after him a small, stunted pine tree, which 
seemed to have strayed away from its native forest on 
purpose for the celebration. On being admitted to the 
grand hall. Bob further added to the decorations a few 
strings of a queer, mossy sort of evergreen. Hereupon 
a very young man with light eyebrows, who had hitherto 
been inconspicuous, suddenly appeared from the depths 
of a battered trunk, over the edge of which he had for 
some time been bent like a siphon, and with a beaming 
face produced a box of veritable, tiny wax candles 1 He 
was '^on the road," he explained, for a large wholesale 
toy shop, and these were samples. He guessed he could 
make it all right with the firm. 
Of course, the affair was a great success. I have no 
space to tell of the sheltered walk that Bob constructed, 
of rugs, from car to car ; of the beautified interior of the 
old baggage-car, draped with shawls and brightened with 
bits of ribbon ; of the mute wonder of the poor emigrants, 
a number of whom had but just arrived from Germany, 
and could not speak a word of English ; of their un- 
bounded delight when the glistening tree was disclosed, 
and the cries of " Weihnachtshaum ! Weihnachtsbaum ! " 
from their rumpled children, whose faces waked into a 
