t?"

"Yes. Find way."

"Then what's the matter?"

"Pymeut no like dark;" and it was not until Mac put on his own
snow-shoes and offered to go part of the way with him that Nicholas was
at last induced to return home.

The moment Kaviak was ascertained to be asleep, O'Flynn displayed the
mucklucks. No mistake, they were dandies! The Boy hung one of them up,
by its long leg, near the child's head at the side of the bunk, and
then conferred with O'Flynn.

"The Colonel's made some little kind o' sweet-cake things for the tree.
I could spare you one or two."

"Divil a doubt Kaviak'll take it kindly, but furr mesilf I'm thinkin' a
pitaty's a dale tastier."

There was just one left in camp. It had rolled behind the flour-sack,
and O'Flynn had seized on it with rapture. Where everybody was in such
need of vegetable food, nobody under-estimated the magnificence of
O'Flynn's offering, as he pushed the pitaty down into the toe of the
muckluck.

"Sure, the little haythen'll have a foine Christian Christmas wid that
same to roast in the coals, begorra!" and they all went to bed save
Mac, who had not returned, and the Boy, who put on his furs, and went
up the hill to the place where he kept the Christmas-tree lodged in a
cotton-wood.

He shook the snow off its branches, brought it down to the cabin,
decorated it, and carried it back.

* * * * *

Mac, Salmon P. Hardy, and the frost-bitten Schiff were waked, bright
and early Christmas morning, by the Boy's screaming with laughter.

The Colonel looked down over the bunk's side, and the men on the
buffalo-skin looked up, and they all saw Kaviak sitting in bed, holding
in one hand an empty muckluck by the toe, and in the other a half-eaten
raw potato.

"Keep the rest of it to roast, anyhow, or O'Flynn's heart will be
broken."

So they deprived Kaviak of the gnawed fragment, and consoled him by
helping him to put on his new boots.

When the Little Cabin contingent came in to breakfast, "Hello! what you
got up on the roof?" says Potts.

"Foot of earth and three feet o' snow!"

"But what's in the bundle!"

"Bundle?" echoes the Boy.

"If you put a bundle on the roof, I s'pose you know what's in it," says
the Colonel severely.

The occupants of the two cabins eyed each other with good-humoured
suspicion.

"Thank you," says the Boy, "but we're not takin' any bundles to-day."

"Call next door," advised the Colonel.

"You think we're