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PARTY of Americans boating on the Thames

insisted that Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin rhyme the names of the villages along the river brink, as they offered peculiar difficulties. Here is the Limerick that she wrote on Medmenham Abbey, which, however it is spelled, is pronounced Meddenam.

THE VICAR OF MEDMENHAM

Few hairs had the Vicar of Medmenham,
Few hairs, and he still was a-sheddin' 'em;
But had none remained

He would not have complained

Because there was far too much red in 'em!

SOM

THE SNOW BABY

OMEWHERE in far north Canada lives the
Snow Baby.

In the Summer when the south winds wave the long pointed tops of the spruce; when the wild rice grows in the marsh and the trout lies deep in the pools, then the Snow Baby lives with the ferns and the leaves and the carpet of

moss.

But when the great white blanket of Winter settles upon the plain, upon the frozen river and lake and sifts through the somber forests, then the Snow Baby is hurried by his mother into the tent-home the Indian father has made of pieces of birch-bark, laid about a frame of poles. Here, upon a carpet of fresh balsam boughs, the little brown babe crawls about in comfort, for a wood fire is burning and it is snug and warm within the teepee. Just outside this thin protection of bark, a still killing cold of fifty or more below, compels not only the trappers of the North to seek shelter but the animals they hunt as well. Underneath old windfalls, under the snow itself they burrow, for strange as it may seem, the snow is a warm blanket and often protects life. But among all the furry

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animals that hide beneath this blanket of nature, there is one (in name at least) that lives within the man-made shelter.

So, when the thin cold yellow of the Winter sun has faded and the purple of the coming night creeps over the frozen land, when the birch trees crack from the bitter cold, then it is that you are glad to be with the Snow Baby and his mother safe within the shelter of thin bark.

With the coming of the night, a single candle is lighted. It throws great hunched shadows on the yellow bark walls of the home. From out these shadows peer the bead-like eyes of the Indian trapper as he watches the mother prepare the Snow Baby for the long sub-arctic night. The little hunter is wrapped about and about in a big furry blanket, made from more than a hundred skins of the white rabbit-the snow-shoe rabbit of North Canada. She draws upon each foot little lynx-skin socks with fur inside and pulls well down over his head a cap of fur. And when the furry bundle is put into a cradle made of a single blanket thrown across two ropes that are tied to stakes-it is then you love him best, for the little bead-like eyes are the two dark spots in all that soft mass of white and they watch you, wondering what sort of a stranger you are this reader, who has wandered into

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