Part 4

"Why, you haven't any ears!" said the little boy. "We did not know how to make them."

"No ears?" cried the snowman. "Then how do I hear what you say? But there now, you are only a little boy, and cannot know everything. Besides, here we are at the palace, and you must be quiet."

The little boy had thought he was passing the schoolhouse where his big brothers and sisters went to school, but when he went inside he saw that he was wrong, and the snowman was right, for in the place where the teacher's desk should have been, was a throne; and on the throne sat the Winter King with icicles in his beard.

As soon as he saw the snowman and the little boy, he began to talk very fast:--

"What has this little boy been doing? Why isn't he in bed? Come here, Jack Frost, and tickle his toes."

"Oh! no, no," cried the snowman. "He has done nothing wrong. He is one of my best friends, and I have brought him here with me to ask you not to let the sun shine to-morrow. I don't want to melt."

"Ah! hum! ha!" said the king. "I don't know about that. You will have to melt sometime, won't you?"

"Of course," said the snowman; "but I'd like to last as long as I can." It made the little boy very sad to hear him talk in this way. He thought he would rather not go to his grandmother's than to risk the snowman in the sun.

"We are very fond of him," he said to the king. "He's the finest snowman we've ever seen, and he looks just as if he were smiling."

"So he does," said the king, looking at the snowman again; "and since you ask it I'll tell you what I will do. I cannot keep the sun from shining, but I will ask the North Wind to freeze the snowman, and perhaps he will last anyhow."

When the snowman heard this he began to dance, and as the little boy had hold of one of his stick arms he had to dance too. Together they danced out of the Winter King's palace, down the streets, into the field, where they found the North Wind waiting for them.

The first thing he did was to blow the hat from the snowman's head.

"Archoo! archoo!" sneezed the snowman. "I know I shall catch cold."

And "archoo!" sneezed the little boy; and he sneezed so loud that he waked himself up, for--do you believe it?--he had been asleep and dreaming all the time!

One part of his dream came true, though, for when he looked out of the window, the next morning, there stood the snowman in the field frozen hard.

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Transcriber Note

Minor typos may have been corrected. Images were moved so as to prevent splitting paragraphs. All images were derived from materials made available on The Internet Archive and the music files were compiled by workers at Distributed Proofreaders. These images and audio files are placed in the Public Domain.

End of Project Gutenberg's A Story Garden for Little Children, by Maud Lindsay