We were all rather tired and very hot before
anything began to happen. Then it happened all at once: the tree burst
through--and not alone. A good deal came with it. The kitchen floor was a
sight, and there was--undoubtedly there was--a strong smell of coffee.
Jonathan smiled. Then he went down cellar and restored the pipe to its
position, while the rest of us cleared up the kitchen,--it's astonishing
what a little job like that can make a kitchen look like,--and as our
friends started to go a voice from beneath us, like the ghost in "Hamlet,"
shouted, "Hold 'em! There's half a freezer of ice-cream down here we can
finish." Sure enough there was! And then he wouldn't have to pack it down.
We had it up. We looted the pantry as only irresponsible adults can loot,
in their own pantry, and the evening ended in luxurious ease. Some time in
the black of the night our friends left, and I suppose the sound of their
carriage-wheels along the empty road set many a neighbor wondering,
through his sleep, "Who's sick now?" How could they know it was only a
plumbing party?

As I look back on this evening it seems one of the pleasantest of the
year. It isn't so much what you do, of course, as the way you feel about
it, that makes the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. Shall we
say of that evening that we meant to read aloud? Or that we meant to have
a quiet evening with friends? Not at all. We say, with all the conviction
in the world, that we meant, on that particular evening, to have a
plumbing party, with the drain as the _piA"ce de rA(C)sistance_. Toward this
our lives had been yearning, and lo! they had arrived!

Some few things, however, are hard to meet in that spirit. When the pigs
broke out of the pen, about nine o'clock, and Hiram was away, and Mrs.
Hiram needed our help to get them in--there was no use in pretending that
we meant to do it. Moreover, the labor of rounding up pigs is one of
mingled arduousness and delicacy. Pigs in clover was once a popular game,
but pigs in a dark orchard is not a game at all, and it will, I am firmly
convinced, never be popular. It is, I repeat, not a game, yet probably the
only way to keep one's temper at all is to regard it, for the time being,
as a major sport, like football and deep-sea fishing and
mountain-climbing, where you are expected to take some risks and not think
too much about results as such. On this basis it has, perhaps, its own
rewards. But the attitude is difficu