With the cheerful heat of the fires, the kind offices of nearly all the well-dressed people to the poorer ones,--for they were not slow, these kid-gloved Pullman passengers, to follow Miss Raymond’s example,--the day wore on quietly and not unpleasantly toward its close. Then some one suddenly remembered that it was Christmas Eve. “Dear me!” cried Miss Raymond delightedly, reaching round the baby to clap her hands; “let’s have a Christmas party!” A few sighed and shook their heads as they thought of their own home firesides; one or two smiled indulgently on the small enthusiast; several chimed in at once. Conductor and baggage-master were consulted, and the spacious baggage car “specially engaged for the occasion,” the originator of the scheme triumphantly announced. Preparations commenced without delay. All the young people put their heads together in one corner, and many were the explosions of laughter as the programme grew. Trunks were visited by their owners and small articles 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 forests 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! He was “on the road,” he explained, for a large wholesale toyshop, and these were samples. He guessed he could make it all right with the firm.