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.