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