The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Snow Image, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Title: The Snow Image

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Posting Date: October 10, 2008 [EBook #513]
Release Date: May, 1996

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Charles Keller. HTML version by Al Haines.

THE SNOW IMAGE

by

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Contents

The Snow Image: A Childish Miracle
The Great Stone Face
Ethan Brand
The Canterbury Pilgrims
The Devil in Manuscript
My Kinsman, Major Molineux

THE SNOW-IMAGE:

A CHILDISH MIRACLE

One afternoon of a cold winter's day, when the sun shone forth with
chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of
their mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow. The elder
child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest
disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and
other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her
brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the
ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody
think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers. The father of these two
children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is important to say, was an
excellent but exceedingly matter-of-fact sort of man, a dealer in
hardware, and was sturdily accustomed to take what is called the
common-sense view of all matters that came under his consideration.
With a heart about as tender as other people's, he had a head as hard
and impenetrable, and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the iron
pots which it was a part of his business to sell. The mother's
character, on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of
unworldly beauty,--a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had
survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid
the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood.

So, Violet and Peony, as I began with saying, besought their mother to
let them run out and play in the new snow; for, though it had looked so
dreary and dismal, drifting downward out of the gray sk