What John said was, that he didn'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.
The truth is, that boys have always been so plenty that they are not
half appreciated. We have shown that a farm could not get along without
them, and yet their rights are seldom recognized. One of the most
amusing things is their effort to acquire personal property. The boy
has the care of the calves; they always need feeding, or shutting up,
or letting out; when the boy wants to play, there are those calves to
be looked after,--until he gets to hate the name of calf. But in
consideration of his faithfulness, two of them are given to him. There
is no doubt that they are his: he has the entire charge of them. When
they get to be steers he spends all his holidays in breaking them in to
a yoke. He gets them so broken in that they will run like a pair of deer
all over the farm, turning the yoke, and kicking their heels, while he
follows in full chase, shouting the ox language till he is red in the
face. When the steers grow up to be cattle, a drover one day comes along
and takes them away, and the boy is told that he can have another pair
of calves; and so, with undiminished faith, he goes back and begins over
again to make his fortune. He owns lambs and young colts in the same
way, and makes just as much out of them.
There are ways in which the farmer-boy can earn money, as by gathering
the early chestnuts and taking them to the corner store, or by finding
turkeys' eggs and selling them to his mother; and another way is to go
without butter at the table--but the money thus made is for the heathen.
John read in Dr. Livingstone that some of the tribes in Central Africa
(which is represented by a blank spot in the atlas) use the butter to
grease their hair, putting on pounds of it at a time; and he said he
had rather eat his butter than have it put to that use, especially as it
melted away so fast in that hot climate.
Of course it was explained to John that the missionaries do not actually
carry butter to Africa, and that they must usually go without it
themselves there, it being almost impossible to make it good from the
milk in the cocoanuts. And it was further explained to him that even
if the heathen never received his butter or the money for it, it was an
excellent thing for a boy to cultivate the habit of self-denial and of
benevolence, and if the heathen never heard of him, he would be blessed
for his generosity. This was all true.
But John said that he was tired of supporting the heathen out of his
butter, and he wished the rest of the family would also stop eating
butter and save the money for missions; and he wanted to know where the
other members of the family got their money to send to the heathen; and
his mother said that he was about half right, and that self-denial was
just as good for grown people as it was for little boys and girls.
The boy is not always slow to take what he considers his rights.
Speaking of those thin pumpkin-pies kept in the cellar cupboard. I used
to know a boy, who afterwards grew to be a selectman, and brushed his
hair straight up like General Jackson, and went to the legislature,
where he always voted against every measure that was proposed, in the
most honest manner, and got the reputation of being the “watch-dog of
the treasury.” Rats in the cellar were nothing to be compared to this
boy for destructiveness in pies. He used to go down whenever he could
make an excuse, to get apples for the family, or draw a mug of cider
for his dear old grandfather (who was a famous story-teller about the
Revolutionary War, and would no doubt have been wounded in battle if he
had not been as prudent as he was patriotic), and come upstairs with a
tallow candle in one hand and the apples or cider in the other, looking
as innocent and as unconscious as if he had never done anything in his
life except deny himself butter for the sake of the heathen. And
yet this boy would have buttoned under his jacket an entire round
pumpkin-pie. And the pie was so well made and so dry that it was not
injured in the least, and it never hurt the boy's clothes a bit more
than if it had been inside of him instead of outside; and this boy would
retire to a secluded place and eat it with another boy, being never
suspected because he was not in the cellar long enough to eat a pie, and
he never appeared to have one about him. But he did something worse
than this. When his mother saw that pie after pie departed, she told the
family that she suspected the hired man; and the boy never said a
word, which was the meanest kind of lying. That hired man was probably
regarded with suspicion by the family to the end of his days, and if he
had been accused of robbing, they would have believed him guilty.
I shouldn't wonder if that selectman occasionally has remorse now about
that pie; dreams, perhaps, that it is buttoned up under his jacket and
sticking to him like a breastplate; that it lies upon his stomach like a
round and red-hot nightmare, eating into his vitals. Perhaps not. It is
difficult to say exactly what was the sin of stealing that kind of pie,
especially if the one who stole it ate it. It could have been used for
the game of pitching quoits, and a pair of them would have made very
fair wheels for the dog-cart. And yet it is probably as wrong to steal
a thin pie as a thick one; and it made no difference because it was easy
to steal this sort. Easy stealing is no better than easy lying, where
detection of the lie is difficult. The boy who steals his mother's pies
has no right to be surprised when some other boy steals his watermelons.
Stealing is like charity in one respect,--it is apt to begin at home.