The Japanese children make their snow men in the image of Daruma Sama. They give him a charcoal ball for each eye and a streak of charcoal for his nose and mouth, and then they have a fine snow man.
It was almost the end of the year before Tara had an opportunity to make a Daruma. In Tokio snow rarely covers the ground for more than twenty-four hours at a time, and sometimes there is a winter with almost no snow at all.
But one evening, only two days before the New Year Festival, the air was so chilly that the veranda shutters were all tightly closed and the shoji drawn together, while the family sat around the fireplace.
Lift up the square of matting in the middle of a Japanese living-room and you will find, sunk in the floor, a stone-lined bowl a few inches deep. This is the fireplace. When the day is cold the maid puts a shovelful of live coals into this bowl, places a wooden frame about a foot high over it, and covers all with a quilt. Then the cold ones may sit around the fire on the floor, draw the quilt over their knees and into their laps, and soon become perfectly warm.
Tara and Umé had heard many a delightful story as they sat snuggled under the warm quilt on winter evenings.
On this evening their father said suddenly, "The white snow-flakes will fall to-night and cover the earth as the white plum blossoms cover the trees."
Tara sprang from under the quilt and ran to open the shutters so that he might see for himself how the weather looked outside.
He was so eager that his fingers slipped and pushed a hole through the paper covering of the shoji. His mother looked sadly at the torn place. "It was only this morning," she said, "that I put new papers on the shoji to be in readiness for the New Year. Baby Yuki's fingers had made many holes in the paper walls."
In a moment Tara ran back into the warm room. "It is faithfully true,"' he cried. "Even now white flakes are falling."
In the morning it was as if they had moved to a different world. The snow made the garden, with its trees and pond and bridge, look like fairyland.