old thing you
ask me to, if you'll just let me have my sweetpeas," repeated Roger.

"A bargain," cried all the girls.

"I'll write for some seed catalogues this afternoon," said Helen. "It's
so appropriate, when it's snowing like this!"

"'Take time by the fetlock,' as one of the girls says in 'Little
Women,'" laughed Roger. "If you'll cast your orbs out of the window
you'll see that it has almost stopped. Come on out and make a snow man."

Every one jumped at the idea, even Helen who laid aside her writing
until the evening, and there was a great putting on of heavy coats and
overshoes and mittens.

CHAPTER II

A SNOW MAN AND SEED CATALOGUES

The snow was of just the right dampness to make snowballs, and a snow
man, after all, is just a succession of snowballs, properly placed.
Roger started the one to go at the base by rolling up a ball beside the
house and then letting it roll down the bank toward the gate.

"See it gather moss!" he cried. "It's just the opposite of a rolling
stone, isn't it?"

When it stopped it was of goodly size and it was standing in the middle
of the little front lawn.

"It couldn't have chosen a better location," commended Helen.

"We need a statue in the front yard," said Ethel Brown.

"This will give a truly artistic air to the whole place," agreed Ethel
Blue.

"What's the next move?" asked Dorothy, who had not had much experience
in this kind of manufacture.

"We start over here by the fence and roll another one, smaller than
this, to serve as the body," explained Roger. "Come on here and help me;
this snow is so heavy it needs an extra pusher already."

Dorothy lent her muscles to the task of pushing on the snow man's
"torso," as Ethel Blue, who knew something about drawing figures, called
it. The Ethels, meanwhile, were making the arms out of small snowballs
placed one against the next and slapped hard to make them stick. Helen
was rolling a ball for the head and Dicky had disappeared behind the
house to hunt for a cane.

"Heigho!" Roger called after him. "I saw an old clay pipe stuck behind a
beam in the woodshed the other day. See if it's still there and bring it
along."

Dicky nodded and raised a mittened paw to indicate that he understood
his instructions.

It required the united efforts of Helen and Roger to set the gentleman's
head on his shoulders, and Helen ran in to the cellar to get some bits
of coal to make his eyes and mouth.

"He hasn't any e