and tinsel. One of them was broken; another, I fear, was irretrievably
ruined by water; and on the third--ah me! there was a cruel spot.

"It don't look like much, that's a fact," said Dick, ruefully . . . .
"But it's the best we could do. . . . Take 'em, Old Man, and put 'em in
his stocking, and tell him--tell him, you know--hold me, Old Man--" The
Old Man caught at his sinking figure. "Tell him," said Dick, with a weak
little laugh,--"tell him Sandy Claus has come."


And even so, bedraggled, ragged, unshaven and unshorn, with one arm
hanging helplessly at his side, Santa Claus came to Simpson's Bar and
fell fainting on the first threshold. The Christmas dawn came slowly
after, touching the remoter peaks with the rosy warmth of ineffable
love. And it looked so tenderly on Simpson's Bar that the whole mountain
as if caught in a generous action, blushed to the skies.




THE PRINCESS BOB AND HER FRIENDS.


She was a Klamath Indian. Her title was, I think, a compromise between
her claim as daughter of a chief, and gratitude to her earliest white
protector, whose name, after the Indian fashion, she had adopted. "Bob"
Walker had taken her from the breast of her dead mother at a time when
the sincere volunteer soldiery of the California frontier were impressed
with the belief that extermination was the manifest destiny of the
Indian race. He had with difficulty restrained the noble zeal of his