xpression. Let me try to model a nose for the poor
lamb!" begged Ethel Blue. "Stick on this arm, Roger, while I sculpture
these marble features."

By dint of patting and punching and adding a long and narrow lump of
snow, one side of the head looked enough different from the other to
warrant calling it the face. To make the difference more marked Dorothy
broke some straws from the covering of one of the rosebushes and created
hair with them.

"Now nobody could mistake this being his speaking countenance," decided
Helen, sticking two pieces of coal where eyes should be and adding a
third for the mouth. Dicky had found the pipe and she thrust it above
his lips.

"Merely two-lips, not ruby lips," commented Roger. "This is an original
fellow; he's 'not like other girls.'"

"This cane is going to hold up his right arm; I don't feel so certain
about the left," remarked Ethel Brown anxiously.

"Let it fall at his side. That's some natural, anyway. He's walking, you
see, swinging one arm and with the other on the top of his cane."

"He'll take cold if he doesn't have something on his head. I'm nervous
about him," and Dorothy bent a worried look at their creation.

"Hullo," cried a voice from beyond the gate. "He's bully. Just make him
a cap out of this bandanna and he'll look like a Venetian gondolier."

James Hancock and his sister, Margaret, the Glen Point members of the
United Service Club, came through the gate, congratulated Ethel Blue on
her birthday, and paid elaborate compliments to the sculptors of the
Gondolier.

"That red hanky on his massive brow gives the touch of color he needed,"
said Margaret.

"We don't maintain that his features are 'faultily faultless,'" quoted
Roger, "but we do insist that they're 'icily regular.'"

"Thanks to the size of the nose Ethel Blue stuck on they're not
'splendidly null.'"

"No, there's no 'nullness' about that nose," agreed James. "That's
'some' nose!"

When they were all in the house and preparing for dinner Ethel Blue
unwrapped the gift that Margaret had brought for her birthday. It was a
shallow bowl of dull green pottery in which was growing a grove of
thick, shiny leaves. The plants were three or four inches tall and
seemed to be in the pink of condition.

"This is for the top of your Christmas desk," Margaret explained.

"It's perfectly beautiful," exclaimed not only Ethel Blue but all the
other girls, while Roger peered over their shoulders to see what it