Sometimes in January the sky comes down close if we walk on a country road, and turn our faces up to look at the sky.
Sometimes on that kind of a January night the stars look like numbers, look like the arithmetic writing of a girl going to school and just beginning arithmetic.
It was this kind of a night Henry Hagglyhoagly was walking down a country road on his way to the home of Susan Slackentwist, the daughter of the rutabaga king near the Village of Liver-and-Onions. When Henry Hagglyhoagly turned his face up to look at the sky it seemed to him as though the sky came down close to his nose, and there was a writing in stars as though some girl had been doing arithmetic examples, writing number 4 and number 7 and 4 and 7 over and over again across the sky.
“Why is it so bitter cold weather?” Henry Hagglyhoagly asked himself, “if I say many bitter bitters it is not so bitter as the cold wind and the cold weather.”
“You are good, mittens, keeping my fingers warm,” he said every once in a while to the wool yarn mittens on his hands.
The wind came tearing along and put its chilly, icy, clammy clamps on the nose of Henry Hagglyhoagly, fastening the clamps like a nipping, gripping clothes pin on his nose. He put his wool yarn mittens up on his nose and rubbed till the wind took off the chilly, icy, clammy clamps. His nose was warm again; he said, “Thank you, mittens, for keeping my nose warm.”
It seemed to him as though the sky came down close
to his nose