ve for her, which might
in the end amount to the same thing. At least, he thought that nobody
would live to speak twice disrespectfully of her in his presence.

IX. THE SEASON OF PUMPKIN-PIE

What John said was, that he did n't care much for pumpkin-pie; but that
was after he had eaten a whole one. It seemed to him then that mince
would be better.

The feeling of a boy towards pumpkin-pie has never been properly
considered. There is an air of festivity about its approach in the fall.
The boy is willing to help pare and cut up the pumpkin, and he watches
with the greatest interest the stirring-up process and the pouring into
the scalloped crust. When the sweet savor of the baking reaches his
nostrils, he is filled with the most delightful anticipations. Why
should he not be? He knows that for months to come the buttery will
contain golden treasures, and that it will require only a slight
ingenuity to get at them.

The fact is, that the boy is as good in the buttery as in any part of
farming. His elders say that the boy is always hungry; but that is a
very coarse way to put it. He has only recently come into a world that
is full of good things to eat, and there is, on the whole, a very
short time in which to eat them; at least, he is told, among the first
information he receives, that life is short. Life being brief, and pie
and the like fleeting, he very soon decides upon an active campaign. It
may be an old story to people who have been eating for forty or fifty
years, but it is different with a beginner. He takes the thick and thin
as it comes, as to pie, for instance. Some people do make them very
thin. I knew a place where they were not thicker than the poor man's
plaster; they were spread so thin upon the crust that they were better
fitted to draw out hunger than to satisfy it. They used to be made up by
the great oven-full and kept in the dry cellar, where they hardened and
dried to a toughness you would hardly believe. This was a long time ago,
and they make the pumpkin-pie in the country better now, or the race of
boys would have been so discouraged that I think they would have stopped
coming into the world.

The truth is, that boys have always been so plenty that they are not
half appreciated. We have shown that a farm could not get along without
them, and yet their rights are seldom recognized. One of the most
amusing things is their effort to acquire personal property. The boy
has the care of the c