e was he allowed to taste. When the door of a certain
closet in which pound-cake for possible guests was always kept in a
jar, and had been ever since Ephraim could remember, was opened, the
boy's eyes would fairly glare with desire. "Jest gimme a little
scrap, mother," he would whine. He had formerly, on rare occasions,
been allowed a small modicum of cake, but now his mother was
unyielding. He got not a crumb; he could only sniff hungrily at the
rich, spicy, and fruity aroma which came forth from the closet, and
swallow at it vainly and unsatisfactorily with straining palate.

Ephraim was not allowed a soft-stoned plum from a piece of mince-pie;
the pie had always been tabooed. He was not even allowed to pick over
the plums for the pies, unless under the steady watch of his mother's
eyes. Once she seemed to see him approach a plum to his mouth when
her back was towards him.

"What are you doing, Ephraim?" she said, and her voice sounded to the
boy like one from the Old Testament. He put the plum promptly into
the bowl instead of his mouth.

"I ain't doin' nothin', mother," said he; but his eyes rolled
alarmedly after his mother as she went across the kitchen. That
frightened Ephraim. He was a practical boy and not easily imposed
upon, but it really seemed to him that his mother had seen him, after
some occult and uncanny fashion, from the back of her head. A vague
and preposterous fancy actually passed through his bewildered boyish
brain that the little, tightly twisted knob of hair on the back of a
feminine head might have some strange visual power of its own.

He never dared taste another plum, even if the knob of hair directly
faced him.

Every day Ephraim had a double task to learn in his catechism, for
Deborah held that no labor, however arduous, which savored of the
Word and the Spirit could work him bodily ill. If Ephraim had been
enterprising and daring enough, he would have fairly cursed the
Westminster divines, as he sat hour after hour, crooking his boyish
back painfully over their consolidated wisdom, driving the letter of
their dogmas into his boyish brain, while the sense of them utterly
escaped him.

There was one whole day during which Ephraim toiled, laboriously
conning over the majestic sentences in loud whispers, and received
thereby only a vague impression and maudlin hope that he himself
might be one of the elect of which they treated, because he was so
strenuously deprived of plums in thi