“It is so wonderfully cold that my whole body crackles!” said the Snow Man. “This is a kind of wind that can blow life into one; and how the gleaming one up yonder is staring at me.” That was the sun he meant, which was just about to set. “It shall not make me wink, I shall manage to keep the pieces.”
He had two triangular pieces of tile in his head instead of eyes. His mouth was made of an old rake, and consequently was furnished with teeth.
He had been born amid the joyous shouts of the boys, and welcomed by the sound of sledge bells and the slashing of whips.
The sun went down, and the full moon rose, round, large, clear, and beautiful in the blue air.
“There it comes again from the other side,” said the Snow Man. He intended to say the sun is showing himself again.
“Ah! I have cured him of staring. Now let him hang up there and shine, that I may see myself. If I only knew how I could manage to move from this place, I should like so much to move. If I could, I would slide along yonder on the ice, just as I see the boys slide; but I don’t understand it; I don’t know how to run.”
“Away! away!” barked the old Yard Dog. He was quite hoarse, and could not pronounce the genuine “Bow, wow.” He had got the hoarseness from the time when he was an indoor dog, and lay by the fire. “The sun will teach you to run! I saw that last winter in your predecessor, and before that in his predecessor. Away! away! and away they all go.”
“I don’t understand you, comrade,” said the Snow Man.
“That thing up yonder is to teach me to run?” He meant the moon. “Yes, it comes creeping from the other side.”
“You know nothing at all,” retorted the Yard Dog. “But then you’ve only just been patched up. What you see yonder is the moon, and the one that went before the sun. It will come again to-morrow, and will teach you to run down into the ditch by the wall. We shall soon have a change of weather; I can feel that in my left hind leg, for it pricks and pains me; the weather is going to change.”
“I don’t understand him,” said the Snow Man; “but I have a feeling that he’s talking about something disagreeable. The one who stared so just now, and whom he called the sun, is not my friend. I can feel that.”
“Away! Away!” barked the Yard Dog. “They told me I was a pretty little fellow: then I used to lie in a chair covered with velvet, up in master’s house, and sit in the lap of the mistress of all. They used to kiss my nose, and wipe my paws with an embroidered handkerchief. I was called ‘Ami, dear Ami, sweet Ami .’ But afterward I grew too big for them, and they gave me away to the housekeeper. So I came to live in the basement story. You can look into that from where you are standing, and you can see into the room where I was master; for I was master at the housekeeper’s. It was certainly a smaller place than upstairs, but I was more comfortable and was not continually taken hold of and pulled about by children as I had been. I received just as much good food as ever, and even better. I had my own cushion, and there was a stove, the finest thing in the world at this season. I went under the stove, and could lie down quite beneath it. Ah! I will sometimes dream of that stove. Away! Away!”
“Does a stove look so beautiful?” asked the Snow Man. “Is it at all like me?”
“It’s just the reverse of you. It’s as black as a crow, and has a long neck and a brazen drum. It eats firewood, so that the fire spurts out of its mouth. One must keep at its side or under it, and there one is very comfortable. You can see it through the window from where you stand.”
And the Snow Man looked and saw a bright, polished thing, with a brazen drum, and the fire gleamed from the lower part of it. The Snow Man felt quite strangely; an odd emotion came over him; he knew not what it meant, and could not account for it, but all people who are not men know the feeling.
“And why did you leave her?” asked the Snow Man, for it seemed to him that the stove must be of the female sex.
“How could you quit such a comfortable place?”
“I was obliged,” replied the Yard Dog. “They turned me out of doors, and chained me up here. I had bitten the youngest young master in the leg, because he kicked away the bone I was gnawing. ‘Bone for bone,’ I thought. They took that very much amiss, and from that time I have been fastened to a chain and have lost my voice. Don’t you hear how hoarse I am? Away! away! I can’t talk any more like other dogs. Away! away! That was the end of the affair.”
But the Snow Man was no longer listening at him. He was looking in at the housekeeper’s basement lodging, into the room where the stove stood on its four legs, just the same size as the Snow Man himself.
“What a strange crackling within me!” he said. “Shall I ever get in there? It is an innocent wish, and our innocent wishes are certain to be fulfilled. I must go in there and lean against her, even if I have to break through the window.”
“You’ll never get in there,” said the Yard Dog; “and if you approach the stove you’ll melt away, away!”
“I am as good as gone,” replied the Snow Man. “I think I am breaking up.”
The whole day the Snow Man stood looking in through the window. In the twilight hour the room became still more inviting; from the stove came a mild gleam, not like the sun nor like the moon; it was only as the stove can glow when he has something to eat. When the room door opened the flame started out of his mouth; this was a habit the stove had. The flame fell distinctly on the white face of the Snow Man, and gleamed red upon his bosom.
“I can endure it no longer,” said he. “How beautiful it looks when it stretches out its tongue!”
The night was long; but it did not appear long to the Snow Man, who stood there lost in his own charming reflections, crackling with the cold.
In the morning the window-panes of the basement lodging were covered with ice. They bore the most beautiful ice flowers that any snow man could desire; but they concealed the stove, which he pictured to himself as a lovely female. It crackled and whistled in him and around him; it was just the kind of frosty weather a snow man must thoroughly enjoy.
But he did not enjoy it; and, indeed, how could he enjoy himself when he was stove-sick ?
“That’s a terrible disease for a Snow Man,” said the Yard Dog. “I have suffered from it myself, but I got over it. Away! away!” he barked; and he added, “the weather is going to change.”
And the weather did change; it began to thaw. The warmth increased, and the Snow Man decreased. He made no complaint and that’s an infallible sign.
One morning he broke down. And, behold, where he had stood, something like a broomstick remained sticking up out of the ground. It was the pole around which the boys had built him up.
“Ah! now I can understand why he had such an intense longing,” said the Yard Dog. “Why, there’s a shovel for cleaning out the stove-rake in his body, and that’s what moved within him. Now he has got over that, too. Away, away!”
And soon they had got over the winter.
“Away! away!” barked the hoarse Yard Dog. And nobody thought any more of the Snow Man.
