CHAPTER I

“Look at the skylight!”

With a joyful laugh, her curls dancing about her head, while her brown eyes sparkled with fun, a little girl danced through the hall and into the dining room where her brother was eating a rather late breakfast of buckwheat cakes and syrup.

“Oh, Bunny, it’s doing it!  It’s come!  Oh, won’t we have fun!” cried the little girl.

Bunny Brown looked up at his sister Sue, holding a bit of syrup-covered cake on his fork.

“What’s come?” he asked.  “Has Aunt Lu come to visit us, or did Wango, the monkey, come up on our front steps?”

“No, it isn’t Mr. Jed Winkler’s monkey and Aunt Lu didn’t come, but I wish she had,” answered Sue.  “But it’s come—­a lot of it, and I’m so glad!  Hurray!”

Bunny Brown put down his fork and looked more carefully at his sister.

“What are you playing?” he asked, thinking perhaps it was some new game.

“I’m not playing anything!” declared Sue.  “I’m so glad it’s come!  Now we can have some fun!  Just look out the window, Bunny Brown!”

“But what has come?” asked the little boy, who was a year older than his sister Sue.  He was a bright chap, with merry blue eyes and they opened wide now, trying to see what Sue was so excited about.

“What is it?” asked Bunny Brown once more.

“It’s snow!” cried Sue.  “It’s the first snow, and it’s soon going to be Thanksgiving and Christmas and all like that!  And we can get out our sleds, and we can go skating and make snow men and—­and—­and——­”

But she just had to stop.  She was all out of breath, and she didn’t seem to have any words left with which to talk to Bunny.

“Oh!  Snow!” exclaimed Bunny, and he said; it in such a funny way that Sue laughed.

Just then in came her mother from the kitchen where she had been baking more cakes for her little boy.

“Oh, it’s you, is it, Sue?” asked Mrs. Brown.  “Do you want some more breakfast?”

“No, thank you, Mother.  I had mine.  I just came in to tell Bunny it’s snowing.  And we can have a lot of fun, can’t we?”

“Well, you children do manage to have a lot of fun, one way or another,” said Mrs. Brown, with a smile.

“Is it snowing, Mother?” asked Bunny, too excited now to want to finish his breakfast.

“Yes, it really is,” answered Mrs. Brown.  “I was so busy getting enough cakes baked for you that I didn’t notice the snow much.  But, as Sue says, it is coming down quite fast.”

“Hurray!” cried Bunny, even as Sue had done.  “Do you think there will be lots of the snow?”

“Well, it looks as though there might be quite a storm for the first snow of the season,” replied the mother of Bunny Brown and his sister Sue.  “It’s a bit early this year, too.  It’s almost two weeks until Thanksgiving and here it is snowing.  I’m afraid we’re going to have a hard winter.”