Ethel Mortons Enterprise | Page 4

just like butterflies or something with wings."
"We'll have to cast our professional eyes into the garden and decide on the best place for the sweetpeas," said Roger. "They have to be planted early, you know. If we plant them just anywhere they'll be sure to be in the way of something that grows shorter so it will be hidden."
"Or grows taller and is a color that fights with them."
"It would be hard to find a color that wasn't matched by one sweetpea or another. They seem to be of every combination under the sun."
"It's queer, some of the combinations would be perfectly hideous in a dress but they look all right in Nature's dress."
"We'll send for some seedsmen's catalogues and order a lot."
"I suppose you don't care what else goes into the garden?" asked Helen.
"Ladies, I'll do all the digging you want, and plant any old thing you ask me to, if you'll just let me have my sweetpeas," repeated Roger.
"A bargain," cried all the girls.
"I'll write for some seed catalogues this afternoon," said Helen. "It's so appropriate, when it's snowing like this!"
"'Take time by the fetlock,' as one of the girls says in 'Little Women,'" laughed Roger. "If you'll cast your orbs out of the window you'll see that it has almost stopped. Come on out and make a snow man."
Every one jumped at the idea, even Helen who laid aside her writing until the evening, and there was a great putting on of heavy coats and overshoes and mittens.
CHAPTER II
A SNOW MAN AND SEED CATALOGUES
The snow was of just the right dampness to make snowballs, and a snow man, after all, is just a succession of snowballs, properly placed. Roger started the one to go at the base by rolling up a ball beside the house and then letting it roll down the bank toward the gate.
"See it gather moss!" he cried. "It's just the opposite of a rolling stone, isn't it?"
When it stopped it was of goodly size and it was standing in the middle of the little front lawn.
"It couldn't have chosen a better location," commended Helen.
"We need a statue in the front yard," said Ethel Brown.
"This will give a truly artistic air to the whole place," agreed Ethel Blue.
"What's the next move?" asked Dorothy, who had not had much experience in this kind of manufacture.
"We start over here by the fence and roll another one, smaller than this, to serve as the body," explained Roger. "Come on here and help me; this snow is so heavy it needs an extra pusher already."
Dorothy lent her muscles to the task of pushing on the snow man's "torso," as Ethel Blue, who knew something about drawing figures, called it. The Ethels, meanwhile, were making the arms out of small snowballs placed one against the next and slapped hard to make them stick. Helen was rolling a ball for the head and Dicky had disappeared behind the house to hunt for a cane.
"Heigho!" Roger called after him. "I saw an old clay pipe stuck behind a beam in the woodshed the other day. See if it's still there and bring it along."
Dicky nodded and raised a mittened paw to indicate that he understood his instructions.
It required the united efforts of Helen and Roger to set the gentleman's head on his shoulders, and Helen ran in to the cellar to get some bits of coal to make his eyes and mouth.
"He hasn't any expression. Let me try to model a nose for the poor lamb!" begged Ethel Blue. "Stick on this arm, Roger, while I sculpture these marble features."
By dint of patting and punching and adding a long and narrow lump of snow, one side of the head looked enough different from the other to warrant calling it the face. To make the difference more marked Dorothy broke some straws from the covering of one of the rosebushes and created hair with them.
"Now nobody could mistake this being his speaking countenance," decided Helen, sticking two pieces of coal where eyes should be and adding a third for the mouth. Dicky had found the pipe and she thrust it above his lips.
"Merely two-lips, not ruby lips," commented Roger. "This is an original fellow; he's 'not like other girls.'"
"This cane is going to hold up his right arm; I don't feel so certain about the left," remarked Ethel Brown anxiously.
"Let it fall at his side. That's some natural, anyway. He's walking, you see, swinging one arm and with the other on the top of his cane."
"He'll take cold if he doesn't have something on his head. I'm nervous about him," and Dorothy bent a worried look at their creation.
"Hullo," cried a voice from beyond the gate. "He's bully. Just make him a cap out of this bandanna and he'll look like a