two left after Helen had cut enough for the next day."

"And there generally weren't any!" sympathized Helen.

"What flower is it you're so crazy over?" asked Ethel Blue.

"Sweetpeas, my child. Never in all my life have I had enough sweetpeas."

"I've had more than enough," groaned Ethel Brown. "One summer I stayed a fortnight with Grandmother Emerson and I picked the sweetpeas for her every morning. She was very particular about having them picked because they blossom better if they're picked down every day."

"It must have taken you an awfully long time; she always has rows and rows of them," said Helen.

"I worked a whole hour in the sun every single day! If we have acres of sweetpeas we'll all have to help Roger pick."

"I'm willing to," said Ethel Blue. "I'm like Roger, I think they're darling; just like butterflies or something with wings."

"We'll have to cast our professional eyes into the garden and decide on the best place for the sweetpeas," said Roger. "They have to be planted early, you know. If we plant them just anywhere they'll be sure to be in the way of something that grows shorter so it will be hidden."

"Or grows taller and is a color that fights with them."

"It would be hard to find a color that wasn't matched by one sweetpea or another. They seem to be of every combination under the sun."

"It's queer, some of the combinations would be perfectly hideous in a dress but they look all right in Nature's dress."

"We'll send for some seedsmen's catalogues and order a lot."

"I suppose you don't care what else goes into the garden?" asked Helen.

"Ladies, I'll do all the digging you want, and plant any old thing you ask me to, if you'll just let me have my sweetpeas," repeated Roger.

"A bargain," cried all the girls.

"I'll write for some seed catalogues this afternoon," said Helen. "It's so appropriate, when it's snowing like this!"

"'Take time by the fetlock,' as one of the girls says in 'Little Women,'" laughed Roger. "If you'll cast your orbs out of the window you'll see that it has almost stopped. Come on out and make a snow man."

Every one jumped at the idea, even Helen who laid aside her writing until the evening, and there was a great putting on of heavy coats and overshoes and mittens.

CHAPTER II

The snow was of just the right dampness to make snowballs, and a snow man, after all, is just a succession of snowballs, properly placed. Roger started the one to go at the base by rolling up a ball beside the house and then letting it roll down the bank toward the gate.

"See it gather moss!" he cried. "It's just the opposite of a rolling stone, isn't it?"

When it stopped it was of goodly size and it was standing in the middle of the little front lawn.

"It couldn't have chosen a better location," commended Helen.

"We need a statue in the front yard," said Ethel Brown.

"This will give a truly artistic air to the whole place," agreed Ethel Blue.

"What's the next move?" asked Dorothy, who had not had much experience in this kind of manufacture.

"We start over here by the fence and roll another one, smaller than this, to serve as the body," explained Roger. "Come on here and help me; this snow is so heavy it needs an extra pusher already."

Dorothy lent her muscles to the task of pushing on the snow man's "torso," as Ethel Blue, who knew something about drawing figures, called it. The Ethels, meanwhile, were making the arms out of small snowballs placed one against the next and slapped hard to make them stick. Helen was rolling a ball for the head and Dicky had disappeared behind the house to hunt for a cane.

"Heigho!" Roger called after him. "I saw an old clay pipe stuck behind a beam in the woodshed the other day. See if it's still there and bring it along."

Dicky nodded and raised a mittened paw to indicate that he understood his instructions.

It required the united efforts of Helen and Roger to set the gentleman's head on his shoulders, and Helen ran in to the cellar to get some bits of coal to make his eyes and mouth.

"He hasn't any expression. Let me try to model a nose for the poor lamb!" begged Ethel Blue. "Stick on this arm, Roger, while I sculpture these marble features."

By dint of patting and punching and adding a long and narrow lump of snow, one side of the head looked enough different from the other to warrant calling it the face. To make the difference more marked Dorothy broke some straws from the covering of one of the rosebushes and created hair with them.

"Now nobody could mistake this being his speaking countenance," decided Helen, sticking two pieces of coal where eyes should be and adding a third for the mouth. Dicky had found the pipe and she thrust it above his lips.

"Merely two-lips, not ruby lips," commented Roger. "This is an original fellow; he's 'not like other girls.'"

"This cane is going to hold up his right arm; I don't feel so certain about the left," remarked Ethel Brown anxiously.

"Let it fall at his side. That's some natural, anyway. He's walking, you see, swinging one arm and with the other on the top of his cane."

"He'll take cold if he doesn't have something on his head. I'm nervous about him," and Dorothy bent a worried look at their creation.

"Hullo," cried a voice from beyond the gate. "He's bully. Just make him a cap out of this bandanna and he'll look like a Venetian gondolier."

James Hancock and his sister, Margaret, the Glen Point members of the United Service Club, came through the gate, congratulated Ethel Blue on her birthday, and paid elaborate compliments to the sculptors of the Gondolier.

"That red hanky on his massive brow gives the touch of color he needed," said Margaret.

"We don't maintain that his features are 'faultily faultless,'" quoted Roger, "but we do insist that they're 'icily regular.'"

"Thanks to the size of the nose Ethel Blue stuck on they're not 'splendidly null.'"

"No, there's no 'nullness' about that nose," agreed James. "That's 'some' nose!"

When they were all in the house and preparing for dinner Ethel Blue unwrapped the gift that Margaret had brought for her birthday. It was a shallow bowl of dull green pottery in which was growing a grove of thick, shiny leaves. The plants were three or four inches tall and seemed to be in the pink of condition.

"This is for the top of your Christmas desk," Margaret explained.

"It's perfectly beautiful," exclaimed not only Ethel Blue but all the other girls, while Roger peered over their shoulders to see what it was.

"I planted it myself," said Margaret with considerable pride. "Each one is a little grapefruit tree."

"Grapefruit? What we have for breakfast? It grows like this?"

"Mother has some in a larger bowl and it is really lovely as a centrepiece on the dining room table."

"Watch me save grapefruit seeds!" and Ethel Brown ran out of the room to leave an immediate request in the kitchen that no grapefruit seeds should be thrown away when the fruit was being prepared for the table.

"When Mr. Morton and I were in Florida last winter," said Mrs. Morton, "they told us that it was not a great number of years ago that grapefruit was planted only because it was a handsome shrub on the lawn. The fruit never was eaten, but was thrown away after it fell from the tree."

"Now nobody can get enough of it," smiled Helen.

"Mother has a receipt for grapefruit marmalade that is better than the English orange marmalade that is made of both sweet and sour oranges," said Dorothy. "Sometimes the sour oranges are hard to find in the market, but grapefruit seems to have both flavors in itself."

"Is it much work?" asked Margaret.

"It isn't much work at any one time but it takes several days to get it done."

"Why?"

"First