[THE SNOWMAN]
O
Once upon a time there was a man who was made of snow. He had sticks for his arms, and coals for his eyes; his nose was made of an icicle, and his mouth was a bit of bent twig, which turned up at the ends, so he looked as if he were smiling.
"He's the finest snowman we've ever seen," said the children who made him; and they joined hands and danced around him till their mother called them in to supper.
"Good-by," they called to him as they climbed the fence that divided the field from the yard. "Good-by. We will bring you a hat to-morrow."
There were a half dozen of the children, and the youngest of them was a little boy who had never helped to make a snowman before. He thought of this one all the time he was eating his supper, and even after he had gone to bed that night. He knew just how the snowman looked with his smiling mouth and stick arms.
"I wish we had taken him a hat to-night," he thought, as his eyelids dropped down like two little curtains over his eyes.
"Archoo! archoo! I wish that you had," said something outside the window; and—do you believe it?—it was the snowman sneezing as hard as he could!
"This is what comes of standing out in the cold bareheaded," he said. "I shall sneeze my head off—I know I shall. Archoo! archoo! archoo!"