umpkin, and so it let them gradually drop off till it only had
one left, and then it just gave all its attention to that one, and did
everything it could to make it grow into the kind of pumpkin it said it
would.

"All this time the bad little pumpkin vine was carrying out its plan of
being a pumpkin-glory. In the first place it found out that if it
expected to get through by fall it couldn't fool much putting out a lot
of blossoms and waiting for them to drop off, before it began to devote
itself to business. The fence was a good piece off, and it had to reach
the fence in the first place, for there wouldn't be any fun in being a
pumpkin-glory down where nobody could see you, or anything. So the bad
little pumpkin vine began to pull and stretch towards the fence, and
sometimes it thought it would surely snap in two, it pulled and
stretched so hard. But besides the pulling and stretching, it had to
hide, and go round, because if it had been seen it wouldn't have been
allowed to go to the fence. It was a good thing there were so many
weeds, that the boy was too lazy to pull up, and the bad little pumpkin
vine could hide among. But then they were a good deal of a hinderance,
too, because they were so thick it could hardly get through them. It had
to pass some rows of pease that were perfectly awful; they tied
themselves to it and tried to keep it back; and there was one hill of
cucumbers that acted ridiculously; they said it was a cucumber vine
running away from home, and they would have kept it from going any
farther, if it hadn't tugged with all its might and main, and got away
one night when the cucumbers were sleeping; it was pretty strong,
anyway. When it got to the fence at last, it thought it was going to
die. It was all pulled out so thin that it wasn't any thicker than a
piece of twine in some places, and its leaves just hung in tatters. It
hadn't had time to put out more than one blossom, and that was such a
poor little sickly thing that it could hardly hang on. The question was,
How can a pumpkin vine climb a fence, anyway?

"Its knees and elbows were all worn to strings getting there, or that's
what the pumpkin thought, till it wound one of those tendrils round a
splinter of the fence, without thinking, and happened to pull, and then
it was perfectly surprised to find that it seemed to lift itself off the
ground a little. It said to itself, 'Let's try a few more,' and it
twisted some more of the tendrils roun