After this human little reaction he passed to a higher field of romance.  He would die for George and then she would bring the little boy she had named William to the lonely headstone—­Suddenly William saw himself in his true and fitting character—­Sydney Carton!  He had lately read A Tale of Two Cities, immediately re-reading until, as he would have said, he “knew it by heart”; and even at the time he had seen resemblances between himself and the appealing figure of Carton.  Now that the sympathy between them was perfected by Miss Pratt’s preference for another, William decided to mount the scaffold in place of George Crooper.  The scene became actual to him, and, setting one foot upon a tin milk-pail which some one had carelessly left beside the smoke-house, he lifted his eyes to the pitiless blue sky and unconsciously assumed the familiar attitude of Carton on the steps of the guillotine.  He spoke aloud those great last words: 

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to—­”

A whiskered head on the end of a long, corrugated red neck protruded from the smokehouse door.

“What say?” it inquired, huskily.

“Nun-nothing!” stammered William.

Eyes above whiskers became fierce.  “You take your feet off that milk-bucket.  Say!  This here’s a sanitary farm.  ’Ain’t you got any more sense ’n to go an’—­”

But William had abruptly removed his foot and departed.

He found the party noisily established in the farm-house at two long tables piled with bucolic viands already being violently depleted.  Johnnie Watson had kept a chair beside himself vacant for William.  Johnnie was in no frame of mind to sit beside any “chattering girl,” and he had protected himself by Joe Bullitt upon his right and the empty seat upon his left.  William took it, and gazed upon the nearer foods with a slight renewal of animation.

He began to eat; he continued to eat; in fact, he did well.  So did his two comrades.  Not that the melancholy of these three was dispersed—­far from it!  With ineffaceable gloom they ate chicken, both white meat and dark, drumsticks, wishbones, and livers; they ate corn-on-the-cob, many ears, and fried potatoes and green peas and string-beans; they ate peach preserves and apricot preserves and preserved pears; they ate biscuits with grape jelly and biscuits with crabapple jelly; they ate apple sauce and apple butter and apple pie.  They ate pickles, both cucumber pickles and pickles made of watermelon rind; they ate pickled tomatoes, pickled peppers, also pickled onions.  They ate lemon pie.