文档介绍：THE SNOW IMAGE
THE SNOW IMAGE
by Hawthorne
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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 mon-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 rable, 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 parlor-windows. The trees and shrubs, h