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In summer they ran to watch the fishing, they caught the many-colored insects, they gathered flowers, they gardened; in winter they made slides, they built snow-men or huts, or pelted each other with snowballs. Welcomed by all, they met with smiles wherever they went. When the time came to begin their education, disasters came, too.
Yet if this anthology reconciles you squeamish Europeans to us snow-men as little as let's suppose the case our "Muses' Almanac," which we let's again suppose the case might have written, it will at least have the merit of helping its companions through the whole of Germany to give the last neck-stab to expiring taste, as we people of Tobolsko like to word it.
November, with its bright, bleak skies, sere leaves tossing, sad winds sobbing, and rains that wept for days and nights together, on dead flowers and dying grasses, moaned itself away at last, and December swept into its place with a good rousing snow-storm, merry sleigh-bells, and bright promises of coming Christmas. The girls coasted and skated, and made snow-men and snowballs and snow-forts.
We had no lack of playmates of both sexes, and with them we certainly talked and shouted no French, but sturdy Berlin German. In winter, too, we were permitted to enjoy ourselves out of doors, and few boys made handsomer snow-men than those our worthy Kurschner always with the order in his buttonhole helped us build in Thiergartenstrasse.
Great masses of dirty ice, too, came floating down the Rhine, and there were rumours of the great river being quite frozen over somewhere up in Switzerland, many hundred miles nearer its source. For myself, I enjoyed it all the bitter cold, the short days, the rapid exercise, the blazing fires within, and the glittering snow without. I made snow-men and snow-castles to my heart's content.
When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto came in white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet. They began to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:— “You’ve got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake. They was a full-grown blizzard ordered for you.” All day the storm went on.
Edward and Margaret talked a great deal about skating and snow-men, and about the fire at Blickley; but they came to a stand at last. The foot-boy went about on tiptoe, and shut the door as if he had been in a sick-room; and this made Hester's short sobs only the more audible. It was a relief when the oranges were on the table at last, and the door closed behind the dinner and the boy.
The long columns of motor-lorries, the gun limbers drawn up by their batteries, the field ambulances by the clearing hospitals, were all cloaked in snow, and the tramp and traffic of an army were hushed in the great quietude. In the trenches the snow fell thickly and made white pillows of the piled sand-bags and snow-men of sentries standing in the shelter of the traverses.
There's skating, and sleigh-riding, and sliding down hill, and Oh, yes. Snowballing and making snow-men. Nobody makes a snow-man but once, and nobody makes a snow-house after it has caved in on him once and like to killed him. And as for snowballing Look here. Do you know what's the nicest thing about winter?
But its tropical shower-bath had left the London air as cleanly and as clear as crystal; the neutral tints of every day were splashes of vivid colour, the waiting umpires animated snow-men, the heap of sawdust at either end a pyramid of powdered gold upon an emerald ground.
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