Little Sister Snow

Binding the whole was a narrow porch, showing a floor polished like a mirror from the slipping and sliding of generations of feet. Yuki Chan first learned to know her face in its reflections and, alas! by the same method had learned the saucy fascination of sticking out her small pink tongue.

On the side of the porch toward the plum-tree the child found her father and mother waiting. The two old people sat on gay cushions with hands folded and feet crossed. Their festal attire bore the marks of a once careless luxury, but now shabbiness tried to hide itself under the bravery of tinsel, where once had been pure gold.

Each year the struggle of obsolete methods of business and the intricacies of progress plowed the furrows a little deeper in the man's face, and when his eyes, that in youth had blazed with ambition, grew wistful and troubled, he dropped them that his wife might not see.

But what silence could hide from this frail woman any mood of