ONIONS, PIGS AND HICKORY-NUTS
One feature of the countryside in which from time to time we found
innocent amusement was the blackboards placed outside farmhouses, on
which are written, that is, "annunciated," the various products the
farmer has for sale, such as apples, potatoes, honey, and so forth. On
one occasion we read: "Get your horses' teeth floated here." There was no
one to ask about what this mysterious proclamation meant. No doubt it was
clear as daylight to the neighbours, but to us it still remains a
mystery. Perhaps the reader knows what it meant. Then on another occasion
we read: "Onions and Pigs For Sale." Why this curious collocation of
onions and pigs? Colin suggested that, of course, the onions were to
stuff the pigs with.
"And here's an idea," he continued. "Suppose we go in and buy a little
suckling-pig and a string of onions. Then we will buy a yard of two of
blue ribbon and tie it round the pig's neck, and you shall lead it along
the road, weeping. I will walk behind it, with the onions, grinning from
ear to ear. And when any one meets us, and asks the meaning of the
strange procession, you will say: 'I am weeping because our little pig
has to die!' And if any one says to me, 'Why are you grinning from ear to
ear?' I shall answer, 'Because I am going to eat him. We are going to
stuff him with onions at the next inn, and eat roast pig at the rising of
the moon.'"
But we lacked courage to put our little joke into practice, fearing an
insufficient appreciation of the fantastic in that particular region.
We were now making for Watkins, and had spent the night at Bradford, a
particularly charming village almost lost amid the wooded hills of
another lovely and spacious valley, through which we had lyrically walked
the day before. Bradford is a real country village, and was already all
in a darkness smelling of cows and apples, when we groped for it among
the woods the evening before. At starting out next morning, we inquired
the way to Watkins of a storekeeper standing at his shop-door. He was in
conversation with an acquaintance, and our questions occasioned a lively
argument as to which was the better of two roads. The acquaintance was
for the road through "Pine Creek," and he added, with a grim smile, "I
guess I should know; I've travelled it often enough with a heavy load
behind"; and the recollection of the rough hills he had gone bumping
over, all evidently fresh in his mind, seemed to give him a curious
amusement. It transpired that he was an undertaker!
So we took the road to Pine Creek, but at the threshold of the village
our fancy was taken by the particularly quaint white wooden
meeting-house, surrounded on three sides with tie-up sheds for vehicles,
each stall having a name affixed to it, like a pew: "P. Yawger," "A.W.
Gillum," "Pastor," and so on. Here the pious of the district tied up
their buggies while they went within to pray, and these sacred stalls
made a quaint picture for the imagination of outlying farmers driving to
meeting over the hills on Sabbath mornings.
It was a beautiful morning of veiled sunshine, so warm that some hardy
crickets chirped faintly as we went along. Once a blue jay came and
looked at us, and the squirrels whirred among the chestnuts and
hickories, and the roadsides were so thickly strewn with fallen nuts that
we made but slow progress, stopping all the time to fill our pockets.
For a full hour we sat down with a couple of stones for nut-crackers, and
forgot each other and everything else in the hypnotizing occupation of
cracking hickory-nuts. And we told each other that thus do grown sad men
become boys again, by a woodside, of an October morning, cracking
hickory-nuts, the world well lost.