"Maybe I can open my ears wider," Flossie said. "I'm going to try, anyhow."
She stood still in the snow, wrinkling her forehead and making funny "snoots" as Freddie called them, trying to widen her ears. But she gave it up finally.
"I guess I can't get a snowflake to tickle me," she said with a sigh.
"You can have the next one that goes into my ear," offered Freddie. "But they melt so soon and run down so fast that I don't see how I am going to get them out."
"Never mind," said Flossie. "I can get a snowflake in my ear when I get home. Just now let's see if we can't get inside this little house. If the door is frozen shut, maybe you can find a stick and poke it open. Look for a stick, Freddie."
"All right, I will," and Freddie began kicking away at the snow around his feet, hoping to turn up a stick. This he soon did.
"I've found one!" he cried. "Now we can get in and away from the storm. I'll make a hole in the snow house!"
With the stick, which was a piece of flat board, Freddie began to toss and shovel aside the snow. The top part came off easily enough, for the flakes were light and fluffy. But underneath them there was a hard, frozen crust and this was not so easily broken and tossed aside. But finally Freddie had made quite a hole, and then he and Flossie saw something queer. For, instead of coming to the hollow inside of the snow house, the little boy and girl saw a mass of sticks, dried grass and dirt. Over this was the snow, and it was piled up round, like the queer houses the Eskimos make in the Arctic regions.
"Oh, look!" cried Flossie. "It isn't a snow house at all. It's just a pile of sticks."
"Maybe it's a stick house, with snow on the outside," Freddie said. "I'm going to dig a little deeper."