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 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 sky, it had a
very cheerful aspect, now that the sun was shining on it. The children
dwelt in a city, and had no wider play-place than a little garden
before the house, divided by a white fence from the street, and with a
pear-tree and two or three plum-trees overshadowing it, and some
rose-bushes just in front of the parlour-windows. The trees and
shrubs, however, were now leafless, and their twigs were enveloped in
the light snow, which thus made a kind of wintry foliage, with here
and there a pendent icicle for the fruit.

"Yes, Violet--yes, my little Peony," said their kind mother; "you may
go out and play in the new snow."

Accordingly, the good lady bundled up her darlings in woollen jackets
and wadded sacks, and put comforters round their necks, and a pair of
striped gaiters on each little pair of legs, and worsted mittens on
their hands, and gave them a kiss apiece, by way of a spell to keep
away Jack Fros