a hundred back
yards, smaller bands of boys and girls were busy rolling huge balls
into a mighty snow man with a broom for a gun and bits of purloined
coal for eyes and nose, and making mock assaults upon it and upon one
another, just as the dainty little darlings in curls and leggings were
doing in the up-town streets, but with ever so much more zest in their
play. Their screams of delight rose to the many windows in the
tenements, from which the mothers were exchanging views with next-door
neighbors as to the probable duration of the "spell o' weather," and
John's or Pat's chance of getting or losing a job in consequence. The
snow man stood there till long after all doubts were settled on these
mooted points, falling slowly into helpless decrepitude in spite of
occasional patching. But long before that time the frost succeeding
the snow had paved the way for coasting in the hilly streets, and
discovered countless "slides" in those that were flat, to the huge
delight of the small boy and the discomfiture of his unsuspecting
elders. With all the sedateness of my fifty years, I confess that I
cannot to this day resist a "slide" in a tenement street, with its
unending string of boys and girls going down it with mighty whoops. I
am bound to join in, spectacles, umbrella, and all, at the risk of
literally going down in a heap with the lot.

There is one over on First Avenue, on the way I usually take when I go
home. It begins at a hydrant, which I suspect has had something to do
in more than one way with its beginning, and runs down fully half a
block. If some of my dignified associates on various committees of
sobriety beyond reproach could see me "take it" not once, but two or
three times, with a ragged urchin clinging to each of the skirts of my
coat, I am afraid--I am afraid I might lose caste, to put it mildly.
But the children enjoy it, and so do I, nearly as much as the little
fellows in the next block enjoy their "skating on one" in the gutter,
with little skids of wood twisted in the straps to hold the skate on
tight.

In sight of my slide I pass after a big storm between towering walls
of snow in front of a public school which for years was the only one
in the city that had an outdoor playground. It was wrested from the
dead for the benefit of the living, by the condemnation of an old
burying-ground, after years of effort. The school has ever since been
one of the brightest, most successful in town. The snowbank