account of our new teacher was _round_ in the middle,
especially in front, and it had a smaller head. Circus, whose idea it
was to make it funny, had dashed home to our house and gotten some
corn silk out of our crib and had made hair for the man's head,
putting it all around the sides of the top of its head, but not
putting any in the middle of the top, nor in the front, so it looked
like an honest-to-goodness bald-headed man.... Then, while different
ones of us were putting a row of buttons on his coat, which were black
walnuts which we stuck into the snow in his stomach, Circus and
Dragonfly disappeared, leaving only Poetry and Little Jim and Little
Tom Till and me, that being all the rest of the gang that was there,
on account of Big Jim had had to go with his pop that afternoon to
take a load of cattle to the city.

I was sitting down on my sled which was crosswise on the top of Little
Jim's, which was crosswise on the top of Poetry's, making my seat just
about knee high. Our snow man was at the bottom of the hill and not
very far from us was a beech tree. Little Jim was standing there under
its low-hanging branches, looking up into it, like he was thinking
something very important which he nearly always is, Little Jim being
the best Christian in the gang and always thinking and sometimes
saying something he had learned in church or that his parents taught
him from the Bible. There were nearly half of the leaves still on the
tree in spite of its being winter and nearly every other tree in the
woods was as bare as Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard. It was a beech
tree and that kind of a tree nearly always keeps a lot of its old
frost-bitten brown leaves on nearly all winter, and only drops them
off in the spring when the new leaves start to come, and push them
off.

It was the same tree where one summer day, there had been a big old
mother bear and her cub. I, all of a sudden, while I was sitting there
on my stack of sleds was remembering that fight we'd had with the old
fierce old mad old mother bear.

Anyway right that very minute while I was remembering the whole story,
and I guessed maybe Little Jim was remembering it also, everything was
so quiet, I said to Little Jim, "I bet you're thinking about how you
killed a bear right there."

Little Jim who had his stick, which he always carried with him, said,
"Nope, something else."

Poetry spoke up from where he was standing beside Mr. Black's snow
statue, and sai