CHAPTER XIV 



A SNOW HOUSE STORY 



Outside my window the boys were building houses 

 of snow, cutting blocks from the frozen drift, piling 

 them up in spiral fashion, and shouting and hurrying 

 in a scramble to be ready first. They built like real 

 men, one boy inside the circle, armed with a great 

 snow-knife, cutting shapely slabs of frozen snow, 

 piling them one against the other spiral-wise, work- 

 ing from left to right as the Eskimo manner is, the 

 other boy outside, patting the blocks into place and 

 stuffing the cracks with powdery snow, taunting the 

 builder with his slowness and urging him to greater 

 hurry. The little playtime houses grew ; it was some 

 competition that the boys were holding, and no 

 doubt Benjie would crow loudly over Jako and the 

 others if he could manage to wall himself in the 

 soonest and cut his way out of the finished beehive, 

 to jeer at the unfinished labours of his rivals, 



I thought of the pictures I had seen of villages 

 of tidy snow huts, like so many beehives all ranged 

 in rows, all white and glistening. But our village is 

 not like that ; our huts are all of wood ; our snow is 

 all soiled and trodden with the tramping of many 

 feet, and even the drifts that rear against the walls 

 are patched and blackened with the smoke from 

 many chimney pipes. And here outside my window 

 were the only snow huts I had seen in all the village, 



lOO 



