_Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York_ AN AMERICAN CHRISTMAS TREE] His next appearance is in those countries where the Greek Church is the national religion. Their Day of St. Nicholas, which is December 6 elsewhere, comes upon what we should call December 19, and the saint is supposed to bring the winter with him. On the frozen river by Peter’s city it is celebrated with a skating and sleighing carnival. Lines of track are laid down on the ice like small-sized street-car lines. Tiny cars run here and there along them, back and forth from the smooth ice-fields roped off for sleigh races or skating contests. Perhaps it was in that cold country he found the high cap, the furs, and the coat he wears for his hard work of chimney scrambling and running the reindeer express on the Christmas Eve we know. Once more after his strenuous American holiday week is over the hard-worked saint appears again. From the little whitewashed villages of Greece north to ice-bound Archangel and east even to Vladivostok the saint swings wearily on thousands of wax-lighted Christmas trees (their Christmas Eve comes, you must remember, thirteen days after ours). But he is a sadly wasted saint by this time—a mere waxen image a few inches long—able only to dance a little at the tip of a branch of a Christmas tree, and that is all he is asked to do. But in some houses you would find him with a queer cotton tassel in the top of his cap, and what happens then is this: some boy or girl comes by, touches his cotton tassel into flame from a lighted taper, and he burns and melts and grows shorter as if he were just an ordinary wax candle until he is all gone. But in spite of that, in the next December, when the little children in Holland beg their mothers to take them out to see the lighted shops, there he is again with his bag of sweets. And if you want to know what happens to him after that you will only have to read this story over again. The Befana Fair in Rome