“Gone! Gone!” barked the watchdog. “I was a puppy once. Little and lovely, they said. At that time I lay in a velvet chair in the house, and in the lap of the master. I was kissed on the snout, and had my paws wiped with an embroidered handkerchief. I was called ‘the loveliest’ and ‘little doggy-woggy,’ but then I got too big for them! They gave me to the housekeeper, and I went down to the basement. You can see in there from where you’re standing. You can see the room where I was the master because that’s what I was at the housekeeper’s. I guess it was a poorer home than upstairs, but it was more comfortable. I wasn’t squeezed and carried around by the children like I was upstairs. The food was just as good as before, and there was more of it! I had my own pillow, and then there was the stove, which is the loveliest thing of all this time of year! I crawled way back under it, so I disappeared. Oh, I still dream about that stove! Gone! Gone!”
“Is a stove so lovely?” asked the snowman. “Does it look like me?”
“It’s the very opposite of you! It’s coal black. It has a long neck with a brass collar. It eats wood so flames come out of its mouth. You have to stay close to its side, very close, or under it. It’s a boundless pleasure! You should be able to see it through the window from where you’re standing.”
And the snowman looked, and he really did see a black shiny polished object with a brass collar. The fire was shining out from below. The snowman felt so strange. He had a sensation that he couldn’t himself account for. Unknown feelings came over him, but they were feelings that all human beings know, if they aren’t snowmen.
“And why did you leave her?” asked the snowman. He felt that it must be a female being. “How could you leave such a place?”
“I couldn’t help it,” said the watchdog. “They threw me out and put me here on a chain. I bit the youngest boy in the shank because he took a shank-bone I was gnawing on. A shank for a shank, I thought. But they took it badly, and from that time on I’ve been chained here. I’ve lost my clear voice. Listen to how hoarse I am: Gone! Gone! That was the end of it.”
The snowman wasn’t listening any longer. He stared steadily into the housekeeper’s basement, into the room where the stove stood on its four iron legs, about the same size as the snowman himself.
“There’s such a strange creaking inside me,” he said. “Will I never be able to get inside there? It’s an innocent wish, and our innocent wishes surely must be granted. It’s my greatest wish, my only wish, and it would really be injustice if it weren’t fulfilled. I must get in there. I must lean up against her, even if I have to break the window!”
“You’ll never get in there,” said the watchdog. “And if you did get to the stove, you’d be a goner. Gone!”
“I’m as good as gone,” said the snowman. “I think I’m breaking in two.”
All day the snowman stood looking in the window. At dusk the room was even more inviting. There was such a soft glow coming from the stove, not like the light of the moon or the sun. No, like only a stove can glow when there’s something in it. When someone opened the door, flames shot out of the stove, as was its habit. The snowman’s white face turned red, and the red glow spread across his chest.
“I can’t bear this,” he said. “How it becomes her to stick out her tongue!”
The night was very long, but not for the snowman. He stood there with his own lovely thoughts that all froze creaking hard.
In the morning the basement windows were frosted over. They had the most beautiful ice flowers on them that any snowman could wish for, but they hid the stove. The panes wouldn’t thaw out, and he couldn’t see her. There was creaking and crunching, and it was just the kind of frosty weather that should please a snowman, but he was not pleased. He could and should have felt so happy, but he wasn’t happy. He had Stuck-on-Stove Syndrome.
“That’s a very dangerous illness for a snowman,” said the watchdog. “I suffered from it myself, but I’ve recovered! Be gone! Gone! We’re going to have a change in the weather.”
And the weather did change. It changed to a thaw.
The thawing increased, and the snowman decreased. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t complain, and that’s a sure sign.
One morning he collapsed. There was something that looked like a broomstick standing in the air where he had been. The boys had built him around it.
“Now I understand his longing,” said the watchdog. “The snowman had a stove poker inside him! That’s what moved him so, but now it’s over. Gone! Gone!”
And soon the winter was gone too.
“Be gone! Gone!” barked the watchdog. But the little girls sang in the yard:
And then no one thinks of the snowman.
THE HUMANIZATION OF TOYS AND OBJECTS
THE STEADFAST TIN SOLDIER
ONCE UPON A TIME there were twenty-five tin soldiers. They were all brothers because they were made from the same old tin spoon. They held rifles on their shoulders, and their faces looked straight ahead, above their lovely red and blue uniforms. The very first thing they heard in this world, when the lid was taken off the box, was “Tin Soldiers!” shouted by a lit tle boy, clapping his hands. He had gotten them because it was his birthday, and he lined them up on the table. They all looked exactly alike, just one was a little different; he had only one leg, since he was made last, and there wasn’t enough tin left. But he stood just as steadily on his one leg as the others did on two, and he’s the one who turned out to be remarkable.
On the table where they were lined up, there were lots of other toys, but what really caught the eye was a beautiful paper castle. You could look right into the rooms through the little windows. There were small trees
