Snowflake Read Free Page A

you.”
    As soon as she had said that she no longer felt so lonely but happy and excited instead as though perhaps something wonderful might be about to happen to her.

    It began first with a strange drumming that sounded from overhead and seemed to go on endlessly. Snowflake had never before heard anything like it, for it was the noise made by rain when first it falls in the early spring upon the hard crust of the winter’s snow.
    Yet, somehow, Snowflake had the feeling that whatever was happening above was welcome and might be in answer to her prayer. Her fears were quieted and she listened to the new sound with a sense of comfort and hope.
    The drumming softened to a plashing to which was added now a gentle murmuring. The long rains at last had filtered down from above and the waters were moving restlessly beneath the layers of frozen snow and ice that still covered the earth.
    Then one day the rain ceased and it began to grow lighter. At first Snowflake could not believe it was true. But the darkness in which she had lived so long turned to deep blue, then emerald green, changing to yellow as though a strong light were shining through a heavy veil.
    The next moment, as though by magic, the veil was lifted. Overhead the sun, warm and strong, burned from a cloudless sky. Snowflake was free once again. Her heart gave a great shout:
    “The sun! The sun! Dearly beloved sun! How glad I am to see you.”

    Snowflake was filled with gratitude for her release, and she cried out: “Oh thank you, thank you!” just in case the One who had heard her prayer and had freed her from her dark prison might be listening.
    Then for the first time she looked about her and was filled with renewed surprise and delight.
    What a different world it was from the mass of grey and white into which she had been born. Now everything was fresh and green and carpeted with flowers.
    True, the high mountain peaks were still capped with white and a few small patches of snow yet lingered on the hillside, but everywhere there was young and tender grass and Snowflake caught a glimpse of small white blossoms like tiny bells on curved green stems.
    There were all the old familiar sights, the square schoolhouse, the church, the gaily painted houses of the village, but the trees that once had bent beneath the burden of snow now proudly lifted high their new buds in their arms to show them to the sun.
    Since Snowflake had been the first to arrive of the winter’s fall upon the mountain, so she had been the last to be uncovered. All about her now there was the rushing, liquid music of running waters.
    And because of the great joy and happiness she felt, Snowflake too began to run.

    She ran over the smooth grass on to the path and down the hill past the butcher store where the fat sausages hung in rows in the window, past the bakery piled high with new brown loaves, across the market square and by the schoolhouse where at the window she caught a glimpse of the little girl with the red cheeks raising her hand to answer a question put by Herr Hüschl, the teacher.
    She ran under a fence and over a gutter; she ran through the farm of the peasant who owned the grey cow, past the barn and around the haystack, over the yellow feet of a white hen engaged in pulling a worm from the ground, and under a black cat who leaped into the air and shook his paw in the most amusing manner.
    She ran past a boy bouncing a rubber ball and another spinning a top; she ran over a meadow that was full of yellow primroses and across a field where a farmer with his two big horses was cutting a deep furrow with his plough. She ran through a quiet wood and awakened the first violet beneath its broad green leaf. She ran . . .
    And as she did so she noticed for the first time that something strange had happened to her. She was different from what she had been before.

    A most wondrous and exciting change had taken place. Snowflake was no longer a lace-like creature of stars and crosses,