“Yes!” Jimmy Rabbit said. “It’s a sure-enough hat. Farmer Green wore it on Sundays for a good many years. I’ve often seen him starting for the meeting-house over the hill with this very hat on his head.”
“Then the giant stole it from him!” Jolly Robin cried in great excitement.
But Jimmy Rabbit thought differently.
“It’s my opinion—” he said—“it’s 61 my opinion that Johnnie Green took this old hat and put it on the giant’s head, after he had made him.”
“Made him!” Jolly Robin repeated. “You don’t mean to say that Johnnie Green could make a giant, do you?”
“Well, he knows how to make a snow-man—so I’ve been told,” Jimmy Rabbit replied. “And though I’ve never seen one before, it’s plain that that’s what this creature is.”
Jolly Robin had listened with growing wonder. Spending his winters in the South, as he did, he had never even heard of a snow-man.
“Are they dangerous—these snow-men?” he inquired anxiously.
“This one certainly isn’t,” Jimmy Rabbit told him. “With his head off, he can’t do any harm. And with the sun shining so warm I should say that by to-morrow 62 he’ll be gone for good. It looks to me as if he might be the last snow-man of the winter, for I don’t believe there’ll be any more snow until next fall.”
“Good!” Jolly Robin cried. “I shall come back to the orchard to live, after all, just as I had intended.” And he felt so happy that he began to sing.