crowed at the end of his first chicken-nap.  What a new world did that party open to him!  I think it likely that he saw there, and probably did not dare say ten words to, some tall, graceful girl, much older than himself, who seemed to him like a new order of being.  He could see her face just as plainly in the darkness of his chamber.  He wondered if she noticed how awkward he was, and how short his trousers-legs were.  He blushed as he thought of his rather ill-fitting shoes; and determined, then and there, that he wouldn’t be put off with a ribbon any longer, but would have a young man’s necktie.  It was somewhat painful, thinking the party over, but it was delicious, too.  He did not think, probably, that he would die for that tall, handsome girl; he did not put it exactly in that way.  But he rather resolved to live 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.