CHAPTER I

It had been a hard, cold, cruel winter, and one that just suited old Frozen Nose, the Storm King, whose palace of ice was on the north shore of the Polar Sea.  He had ordered Rain, Hail, and Snow, his slaves, to accompany Lord Boreas Bluster on an invasion of the temperate zone, and when they had done his bidding he harnessed up his four-in-hand team of polar bears and went as far south as he dared, just to see how well they had obeyed him.  How he roared with laughter when he found nearly all vegetation killed, and the earth wrapped in a white mantle as thick as his own bear-skins piled six feet deep!  There was no nonsense about that sort of work.

“Catch any pert, saucy little flowers sticking up their heads through such a blanket!” said Frozen Nose to himself.  “No, no; I’ve fixed ’em for a few years, anyhow.  They’re dead as door-nails, and Spring with all her airs and graces will never bring them to life again.  Ugh! how I hate ’em and all sweet smells!  Wish I might never have anything but whale-oil on my hair and handkerchiefs for the rest of my life!”

“There’s no fear but what you will, and stale at that,” said the ugliest of his children, young Chilblain, giving his father’s big toe a tweak as he passed, and grinning when he heard Frozen Nose grumble out,

“There’s the gout again, I do believe!”

But Boreas Bluster, coming in just then, saw what was going on, and gave Chilblain a whack that sent him spinning out of the room.

To tell the truth, Boreas was not as hardhearted as he looked.  He was the most honest and straightforward of all Frozen Nose’s friends.  To be sure, he had to obey stern commands, and do many things that required a show of fierceness, but in the course of his travels he often yielded to a kind impulse, and restrained his fury when to indulge it would have pleased old Frozen Nose mightily.

This very day he had met with a strange adventure, which had been the occasion of a hasty return to the palace, and had so stirred his heart that the whack he gave young Chilblain was but the safety-valve to his feelings—­a sort of letting off of steam which otherwise might have exploded and burst every block of ice in the realm.

In the many furious storms which had occurred of late Boreas had seen the destruction of numerous forests, and had even assisted in laying waste the country.  But one night an avalanche had buried a hamlet from which only one living soul had escaped, and that was a young child—­a mere sprig of a girl, with hair like the flax and eyes like its flowers, a little, timid, crying child—­whom B.B. had actually taken in his arms and carried all the way out of the woods, over the mountains, and finally into Frozen Nose’s own palace by the Polar Sea.