These snow-crystals aren't quiet as good for snow-balls as feather-flakes, for they (the snow-crystals) are dry: so they can't keep together as feather-flakes do.
The snow is dear to some children for they like sleighing.
As I said at the top--the snow comes from the clouds.
Now the trees are bare, and no flowers are to see in the fields and gardens, (we all know why) and the whole world seems like asleep without the happy birds songs which left us till spring.
But the snow which drove away all these pretty and happy things, try, (as I think) not to make us at all unhappy; they covered up the branches of the trees, the fields, the gardens and houses, and the whole world looks like dressed in a beautiful white--instead of green--dress, with the sky looking down on it with a pale face.
And so the people can find some joy in it, too, without the happy summer.
MARY ANTIN.
And now that it stands there, with _her_ name over it, I am ashamed of my flippant talk about vanity.

More to me than all the praise I could hope to win by the conquest of fifty languages is the association of this dear friend with my earliest efforts at writing; and it pleases me to remember that to her I owe my very first appearance in print.
Vanity is the least part of it, when I remember how she called me to her desk, one day after school was out, and showed me my composition--my own words, that I had written out of my own head--printed out, clear black and white, with my name at the end! Nothing so wonderful had ever happened to me before.

My whole consciousness was suddenly transformed.

I suppose that was the moment when I became a writer.

I always loved to write,--I wrote letters whenever I had an excuse,--yet it had never occurred to me to sit down and write my thoughts for no person in particular, merely to put the word on paper.