e water pail and go
down to the spring and get a pail of fresh water?" which I didn't
exactly want to do, on account of it was very warm in the cabin and
would be very cold out there, but when Little Jim piped up and said,
"Sure, I'll do it," I all of a sudden said the same thing, and Little
Jim and I were out there in less than a jiffy, with the old man's
empty pail in one of my hands, and were galloping along through the
snow toward the spring, which was right close to a big spreading beech
tree, which, like the one at the bottom of Bumblebee hill, still had
most of its old brown leaves on it....

We filled the pail real quick with the sparkling, very cold water, and
hurried back to the cabin. I started to open the door, when Little Jim
said, "Wait a minute, I want to see something," and he swished around
quick and went back down the path toward the spring, and turned around
again and looked up toward the chimney of the old man's cabin. He
squinted his eyes to keep the sun from blinding them and looked and
looked, then he looked away in the direction of the woodshed, and I
wondered what in the world that little guy was thinking.

"'Smatter?" I said, and he said, "Nothing,--there's certainly a lot of
snow on the roof of that woodshed, and there isn't any on the old
man's cabin. How come?" Then he socked a stump with his stick, and
came lickety-sizzle to the door, opened it for me to go in with the
pail of water, which I did.

Well, as soon as we got through with our sassafras tea, which Little
Jim said tasted like a very sweet hot lolly pop, we all scrambled
around in the old man's cabin getting ready to go home. If it had been
in the summer-time, we would have gone home the long way round,
following the old wagon trail, and then we'd have taken a short cut
through the swamp, and if it had been summer-time maybe stopped at the
big mulberry tree and climbed up into it and helped ourselves to the
biggest, ripest mulberries that grew anywhere along Sugar Creek. But
it wasn't summer, so we took the short cut, going through the cave to
the sycamore tree, where most of us separated and went in different
directions to our different homes, all except Poetry and me, who, as
you know, were going to get his camera and take a picture of Mr.
Black's snow statue, his parents having bought a new camera for him at
Christmas.

* * * * *

"Well, well," Poetry's mother said to us when we stopped besid