“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.