“She had had a good hunting season, with plenty of seals and salmon to eat, and she was fat and comfortable.  Though very drowsy, she did not go quite to sleep at once, but for several days, in a dreamy half-doze, she kept from time to time turning about and rearranging her bed.  All the time the snow was piling down into the crevice, till at last it was level full and firmly packed.  And in the meantime the old bear, in her sleepy turnings, had managed to make herself a sort of snowhouse—­decidedly narrow, indeed, but wonderfully snug in its way.  There was no room to take exercise, of course, but that, after all, was about the last thing she was thinking of.  A day or two more and she was too fast asleep to do anything but breathe.

“The winter deepened, and storm after storm scourged the naked plain; and the snow fell endlessly, till the snowhouse was buried away fairly out of remembrance.  The savage cold swept down noiselessly from outer space, till, if there had been any such things as thermometers up there, the mercury would have been frozen hard as steel and the thin spirit to a sticky, ropy syrup.  But even such cold as that could not get down to the hidden snow-house where the old bear lay so sound asleep.”

The Child wagged his head wistfully at the picture, and then cheered himself with the resolve to build just such a snowhouse in the back yard that winter—­if only there should fall enough snow.  But he managed to hold his tongue about it.

“Just about the middle of the winter,” went on Uncle Andy, after a pause to see if the Child was going to interrupt him again, “the old bear began to stir a little.  She grumbled, and whimpered, and seemed to be having uneasy dreams for a day or two.  At last she half woke up—­or perhaps a little more than half.  Then a little furry cub was born to her.  She was just about wide enough awake to tell him how glad she was to see him and have him with her, and to lick him tenderly for a while, and to get him nursing comfortably.  When she had quite satisfied herself that he was a cub to do her credit, she dozed off to sleep again without any anxiety whatever.  You see, there was not the least chance of his being stolen, or falling downstairs, or getting into any mischief whatever.  And that was where she had a great advantage over lots of mothers whom we could, think of if we tried.”

“But what made the steam, Uncle Andy?” broke in the Child, somewhat irrelevantly.  He had a way, sometimes rather exasperating to the narrator, of never forgetting the loose ends in a narrative, and of calling attention to them at unexpected moments.