Carolyn of the Corners

by Ruth Belmore Endicott

Again it snowed all night. “My goodness me!” sighed Carolyn May the next morning when she arose, to find all the paths filled up again. “Don’t it ever stop snowing till springtime comes around again, Aunty Rose?”

“Oh, yes,” answered the housekeeper, smiling quietly. “But I thought you loved the snow?”

“I do,” the child responded. “Anyway, I guess I do,” she added. “But—but couldn’t they spread it out a little thinner? Seems to me we must be getting it all at once. Why, I can’t see any of the walls or fences!”

That was true enough. Uncle Joe had even to dig Prince out of his house that morning. After that, when it stormed, Prince was allowed to lie by the kitchen fire—certainly a great concession on Aunty Rose’s part.

This was really the heaviest storm of the season, so far. When Carolyn May floundered to school, with Prince going in front to break the path, there was a huge bank of snow piled against one corner of the schoolhouse. This quite closed up the boys’ door, and only the girls’ entrance could be used.

But the boys got to work at recess and tunnelled through the great drift, so that there was a passage to their door. The wind had packed the snow hard, and the crust had frozen, so there was a safe roof over the tunnel through the snow.

At noon some of the girls went through the passage, too; and among them was Carolyn May. As she went down the steps she laughed gleefully, crying:

“Oh, it’s like going into the subway, isn’t it?”

“What’s the subway?” asked Freda Payne instantly. “You don’t mean to say you have snow tunnels like this in the city, do you? You said men carted the snow all away in wagons, or melted it. Can’t be much snow where you come from, Car’lyn May.”

“Oh, no; not snow tunnels,” the city child explained. She had to do a good deal of explaining these days. “The subway’s just a hole in the ground, and you go down steps into it, and it’s all—all marble, I guess, ’cause it’s white and shiny. And trains come along, and you get on, and you ride all the way from One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street down to papa’s office, and——”