Sjömansbiblioteket

Once more, Vladimir Oravsky and Kurt Peter Larsen, the authors of Beatrice Takes A Trip and many more, let us enjoy the humor in a fabulistic story with lots of depth.
These are the opening lines:
One of the first winters that Joel the poisonous snake lived in the big tree in the big park in the middle of the big city he woke up one morning to find everything covered with cold white stuff.
“Hmf! What’s this?” Joel sneered. If anything could make Joel grumpy it was cold things. “Hmf!”
Joel put out his tongue to sniff the white stuff more closely. Nothing. No smell or taste at all. Only cold, cold, cold.
“Hmf!” Joel repeated.
Even being of the cold-blooded persuasion Joel preferred heat to cold, the hotter the better for him. And now this instead? This white stuff, this...SNOW! Yes, that’s what the cold white stuff was called if Joel remembered correctly.