n't
impress me as being quite fair to Dinky-Dunk. So I'm going to wait a
week or two and let the cream of conviction rise on the pan of
indecision. There's a tiny parliament of angels, in the inner chambers
of our heart, who talk these things over and decide them while we
sleep.

_Friday the Seventeenth_

We had to dig in, like bears, for two whole days while the first real
snow-storm of the winter raged outside. But the skies have cleared,
the wind has gone, and the weather is crystal-clear again. Dinkie and
Poppsy, furred to the ears, are out on the drifts learning to use the
snow-shoes which Percy and Olga sent down to them for Christmas.
Dinkie has made himself a spear by lashing his broken-bladed
jack-knife to the handle of my headless dutch-hoe and has converted
himself into a stealthy Iluit stalking a polar bear in the form of
poor old Scotty, who can't quite understand why he is being driven so
relentlessly from crevice to Arctic crevice. They have also built an
igloo, and indulged in what is apparently marriage by capture, with
the reluctant bride making her repeated escape by floundering over
drifts piled even higher than the fence-tops. It makes me hanker to
get my own snow-shoes on my moccasined feet again and go trafficking
over that undulating white world of snow, where barb-wire means no
more than a line-fence in Noah's Flood. No one could remain morose,
in weather like this. You must dress for it, of course, since that
arching blue sky has sword-blades of cold sheathed in its velvety soft
azure. But it goes to your head, like wine, and you wonder what makes
you feel that life is so well worth living.

_Tuesday, the Twenty-First_

The armistice continues. And I continue to sit on my keg of powder and
sing "_O Sole Mio_" to the northern moon.

I have had Whinstane Sandy build a toboggan-slide out of the old
binder-shed, which has been pretty well blown to pieces by last
summer's wind-storms. He picked out the soundest of the two-by-fours
and made a framework which he boarded over with the best of the
weather-bleached old siding. For when you haven't the luxury of a hill
on your landscape, you can at least make an imitation one. Whinnie
even planed the board-joints in the center of the runway and
counter-sunk every nail-head--and cussed volubly when he pounded his
heavily mittened thumb with the hammer. The finished structure could
hardly be called a thing of beauty. We have only one