One afternoon of a cold winter's day,

two children asked their mother if they could play in the new-fallen snow.

The children lived in the city and had no wider play place than a little garden before the house, divided from the street by a white fence. Their mother bundled them up in woolen jackets and wadded sacks, and a pair of striped gaiters on each little pair of legs, and worsted mittens on their hands. Out they ran, with a hop-skip-and-jump, into the heart of a huge snowdrift. When they had frosted one another all over with handfuls of snow, they had a new idea.

"Let us make an image out of snow," said the older sister. "It shall be our little sister and shall run about and play with us all winter long!"

"Oh, yes!" cried the little brother. "And mother shall see it."

"But she must not make her come into the warm parlor, for our little snow sister will not love the warmth." So the children began this great business of making a snow image that should run about. It seemed, in fact, not so much to be made by the children as to grow up under their hands as they were playing and talking about it.

"Here is the snow for her dress. Oh, how beautiful she begins to look," said the boy as he came floundering through the drifts.

"We must have some shining little bits of ice to make the brightness of her eyes. She is not finished yet," said the girl.

"Here they are," cried the boy. "Mother, mother! Look out and see what a nice little girl we have made!"

 Their mother put down her work for an instant and looked out of the window. She was dazzled by the sun that had sunk almost to the edge of the world so she could not see the garden very distinctly. Still, through all the brightness of the sun and the snow, she saw a strange, small white figure in the garden. The boy was bringing fresh snow, and his sister was moulding it as a sculptor adds clay to his model. 

The longer she looked, the more and more surprised she grew.

Just then there came a breeze of the pure west wind blowing through the garden. It sounded so wintry cold that the mother was about to tap on the window pane to call the children in, when they both cried out to her with one voice:

"Mother, mother! We have finished our little snow sister and she is running about the garden with us!"

 Why, if you will believe me, there was a small figure of a girl dressed all in white, with rosy cheeks and golden curls, playing with the children. She was none of the neighboring children. Not one had so sweet a face. Her dress fluttered in the breeze; she danced about in tiny white slippers. She was like a flying snowdrift.

"Who is this child?" the mother asked. "Does she live near us?"

The older child laughed that her mother could not understand so clear a matter. "This is our little snow sister," she said, "whom we have just been making."

Just then the garden gate was thrown open and the children's father came in. A fur cap was drawn down over his ears and the thickest of gloves covered his hands. He had been working all day and was glad to get home. He smiled as he saw the children and their mother. His heart was tender, but his head was as hard and impenetrable as one of the iron pots that he sold in his hardware shop. At once, though, he perceived the little white stranger playing in the garden.

"What little girl is that," he asked, "out in such bitter weather in a flimsy white gown and those thin slippers?"

"I don't know," the mother said. "The children say she is nothing but a snow image that they have been making this afternoon."

 

 "This little stranger must be brought in out of the snow. We will take her into the parlor, and you shall give her a supper of warm bread and milk and make her as comfortable as you can." But the children seized their father by the hand.

"No," they cried. "This is our little snow girl, and she needs the cold west wind to breathe."

The father laughed. "Nonsense," he said.

"Come, you odd little thing," cried the honest man, seizing the snow child by her hand. "I have caught you at last and will make you comfortable in spite of yourself. We will put a nice new pair of stockings on your feet and you shall have a warm shawl to wrap yourself in. Your poor little nose, I am afraid, is frost bitten. But we will make it all right. Come along in."

So he led the snow child toward the house. She followed him, drooping and reluctant. All the glow and sparkle were gone from her.

"After all," said the mother, "she does look as if she were made of snow."

A puff of the west wind blew against the snow child; she sparkled again like a star.

"That is because she is half frozen, poor little thing!" said the father. "Here we are where it is warm!"

Sad and drooping looked the little white maiden as she stood on the hearth rug. The heat of the stove struck her like a pestilence. She looked wistfully toward the windows and caught a glimpse, through its red curtains, of the snow-covered roofs, the frosty stars and the delicious intensity of the cold night.

The mother had gone in search of the shawl and stockings, and the boy and girl looked with terror at their little snow sister.

"I am going to find her parents," said the father, but he had scarcely reached the gate when he heard the children scream. He saw their mother's white face at the window.

"There is no need of going for the child's parents," she said.

There was no trace of the little white maiden, unless it were a heap of snow which, while they were gazing at it, melted quite away upon the hearth rug.

"What a quantity of snow the children brought in on their feet," their father said at last. "It has made quite a puddle here before the stove."

The stove, through the glass of its door, seemed to grin like a red-eyed demon at the mischief which it had done.

from "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales" by Nathaniel Hawthorne