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.

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 unbounded delight when the glistening tree was disclosed, and the cries of “Weihnachtsbaum! Weihnachtsbaum!” from their rumpled children, whose faces waked into a glow of blissful recollection at the sight. Ah! if you could have seen the pretty gifts, the brave little pine (which all the managers agreed couldn’t possibly have been used had it been an inch taller); the improvised tableaux, wherein Bob successively personated an organ-grinder, a pug dog, and Hamlet, amid thunders of applause from the brakemen and engineers! Then the passengers sang a simple Christmas carol, Miss Raymond leading with her pure soprano, and Bob chiming in like the diapason of an organ.

Just as the last words died away a sudden hush came over the audience. Could it be an illusion, or did they hear the muffled but sweet notes of a church bell faintly sounding without? Tears came into the eyes of some of the roughest of the emigrants as they listened, and thought of a wee belfry somewhere in the Fatherland, where the Christmas bells were calling to prayers that night. The sound of the bells ceased, and the merriment went on, while the young man, with eyebrows lighter than ever, but with radiant face, let himself quietly into the car unnoticed. It had been his own thought to creep out into the storm, clear away the snow from the nearest locomotive bell, and ring it while the gayety was at its height.

All this indeed there was, and more; but to Bob the joy and sweetness of the evening centred in one bright face. What mattered it if the wind roared and moaned about the lonely snow-drifted train, while he could look into those brown eyes and listen to that voice for whose every tone he was fast learning to watch?

Well, the blockade was raised, and the long railroad trip finished at last. But two of its passengers, at least, have agreed to enter upon a still longer journey.