“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 compatriots long enough to convince them that the exemption of one Indian baby would not invalidate this theory.  And he took her to his home,—­a pastoral clearing on the banks of the Salmon River,—­where she was cared for after a frontier fashion.

Before she was nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness of the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker.  As a playfellow of the young Walkers she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was inefficient.  She lost the former in the trackless depths of a redwood forest; she basely abandoned the latter in an extemporized cradle, hanging like a chrysalis to a convenient bough.  She lied and she stole,—­two unpardonable sins in a frontier community, where truth was a necessity and provisions were the only property.  Worse than this, the outskirts of the clearing were sometimes haunted by blanketed tatterdemalions with whom she had mysterious confidences.  Mr. Walker more than once regretted his indiscreet humanity; but she presently relieved him of responsibility, and possibly of bloodguiltiness, by disappearing entirely.

When she reappeared, it was at the adjacent village of Logport, in the capacity of housemaid to a trader’s wife, who, joining some little culture to considerable conscientiousness, attempted to instruct her charge.  But the Princess proved an unsatisfactory pupil to even so liberal a teacher.  She accepted the alphabet with great good-humor, but always as a pleasing and recurring novelty, in which all interest expired at the completion of each lesson.  She found a thousand uses for her books and writing materials other than those known to civilized children.  She made a