This chilly gentleman rose, imposingly from behind a desk of snow. Manuscripts of sleet lay in his frozen hand. An old silk hat, well glazed with drippings from the elm-tree, was pitched irreverently upon the back of his head.

“They say,” replied Mrs. Carruth complainingly,[29] “that the snow-man is meant to take off one of the Professors.”

[29]

“Do they? I should think he might be. Which one?” answered the Professor’s daughter. Her languid eyes warmed into merriment. “I call that fun.”

“I call it irreverent,” sighed the Professor’s wife. “I call it profane.”

“Now, Mother!” The young lady laid a green, theological stocking across her shapely knee, and pulled the toe through the foot argumentatively. “Don’t you think that is a little over-emphasized?”

Mrs. Carruth lifted her mild, feminine countenance from that shirt of the Professor’s which she always found absorbing,—the one whose button-holes gave out, while the buttons stayed on. She regarded her daughter with a puzzled disapproval. She was not used to such phrases as “over-emphasis” when she was young.

“Helen, Helen,” she complained, “you do not realize what a trial you are to me. If there is anything sacrilegious or heretical to be found anywhere, you are sure to—to—you are certain to find it interesting,” ended the mother vaguely.

“See, Mother! See!” interrupted Helen. Her laugh bubbled merrily through the sewing-room. “Just look out of the window, and see! The boys have stuck a whisk broom for a feather in the snow professor’s hat! And now they’re giving him spectacles and a fountain pen. What delicious heresy, isn’t it, Mother? Come and look!”

But after these trifling and too frequent conflicts[30] with her mother, Helen never failed to feel a certain reaction and depression. She evaded the mending-basket that afternoon as soon as possible, and slipped into her own room; which, as we have said, was in a wing of the house, and looked from east to west. She could not see the snow professor here. Nobody now accused her of heresy. The shouts of the boys had begun to die away. Only the mountains and the great intervale were peacefully visible from the warm window. Through the cold one the Theological Seminary occupied the perspective solidly.

[30]

Nature had done a good deal for the 

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