"You call this cold?" O'Harra said.
"Why this is just like summer.
Now I remember once, up north,
A freeze that was a hummer!
"It grew so cold, 'twixt night and day,
That while the sun was risin'
It frozeup stiff and had to stay
A month on the horizon.
"Now that was cold, you must admit,
But ere that day had parted
A freeze that really was a freeze
Down from the north pole started.
"And just six hops ahead of it
A polar bear came rushing,
The cold shap snapping at his tail--
And how that bear was mushing!
"Then, as they passed my cabin door,
The cold spell, sprinting faster,
Just missed the bear, which you'll agree
Prevented dire disaster.
"It missed the bear but caught instead
His shadder, froze it tighly
Right there before my cabin door,
Both interesting and sightly.
"'A shadder for a door-mat,' I
Exclaimed, and with an ember
I printed 'WELCOME' on its side
Like mats that I remember.
"All winter long that shadder lay
Before my humble cabin,
Until the fingertips of spring
Into the north came stabbin'.
"In front of spring, the polar bear
Came looking for his shadder,
Which having thus been left behind
Had been a-gittin' madder.
"It got so mad it thawed and riz,
Its temper rising higher,
And shadder-boxed the bear around--
It did, er I'm a liar.
"It licked the bear both clean and fair,
And had me laughing weakly,
For when the shadder trotted off
The bear he follered meekly.
"You've oft seen bears cast shadders, sure--
That's only customary.
But when a shadder casts a bear,
It's extraordinary!"
--Author: LeRoy W. Snell
--Source: OCR scan of a copy of text typed on a manual typewriter by LeRoy Behling (with some minor corrections for OCR and typing errors and to clean up the formatting)