2015م - 1444هـ
The Snow Image: A Childish Miracle

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Snow Image: A Childish Miracle (1851) is a story Hawthorne originally intended for adults, later adapted for children. A brother and sister, named Violet and Peony, create a snow girl that magically comes to life, but melts when their unimaginative father insists she's real and brings her inside (spoiler alert: she melts). We feature Hawthorne's story in our collections, Winter Sports Stories, and Children's Stories.

An illustration for the story The Snow Image: A Childish Miracle by the author Nathaniel Hawthorne

Marcus Waterman illustration, 1864 edition

One afternoon of a cold winter's day, when the sun shone forth with chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of their mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow. The elder child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers. The father of these two children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is important to say, was an excellent but exceedingly matter-of-fact sort of man, a dealer in hardware, and was sturdily accustomed to take what is called the common-sense view of all matters that came under his consideration. With a heart about as tender as other people's, he had a head as hard and impenetrable, and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the iron pots which it was a part of his business to sell. The mother's character, on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty,--a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood.