Ephraim was not allowed a soft-stoned plum from a piece of mince-pie; the pie had always been tabooed.  He was not even allowed to pick over the plums for the pies, unless under the steady watch of his mother’s eyes.  Once she seemed to see him approach a plum to his mouth when her back was towards him.

“What are you doing, Ephraim?” she said, and her voice sounded to the boy like one from the Old Testament.  He put the plum promptly into the bowl instead of his mouth.

“I ain’t doin’ nothin’, mother,” said he; but his eyes rolled alarmedly after his mother as she went across the kitchen.  That frightened Ephraim.  He was a practical boy and not easily imposed upon, but it really seemed to him that his mother had seen him, after some occult and uncanny fashion, from the back of her head.  A vague and preposterous fancy actually passed through his bewildered boyish brain that the little, tightly twisted knob of hair on the back of a feminine head might have some strange visual power of its own.

He never dared taste another plum, even if the knob of hair directly faced him.

Every day Ephraim had a double task to learn in his catechism, for Deborah held that no labor, however arduous, which savored of the Word and the Spirit could work him bodily ill.  If Ephraim had been enterprising and daring enough, he would have fairly cursed the Westminster divines, as he sat hour after hour, crooking his boyish back painfully over their consolidated wisdom, driving the letter of their dogmas into his boyish brain, while the sense of them utterly escaped him.

There was one whole day during which Ephraim toiled, laboriously conning over the majestic sentences in loud whispers, and received thereby only a vague impression and maudlin hope that he himself might be one of the elect of which they treated, because he was so strenuously deprived of plums in this life, and might therefore reasonably expect his share of them in the life to come.

That day poor Ephraim—­glancing between whiles at some boys out coasting over in a field, down a fine icy slope, hearing now and then their shouts of glee—­had a certain sense of superiority and complacency along with the piteous and wistful longing which always abode in his heart.

“Maybe,” thought Ephraim, half unconsciously, not framing the thought in words to his mind—­“maybe if I am a good boy, and don’t have any plums, nor go out coasting like them, I shall go to heaven, and maybe they won’t.”  Ephraim’s poor purple face at the window-pane took on a strange, serious expression as he evolved his childish tenet of theology.  His mother came in from another room.  “Have you got that learned?” said she, and Ephraim bent over his task again.

Ephraim had not been quite as well as usual this winter, and his mother had been more than usually anxious about him.  She called the doctor in finally, and followed him out into the cold entry when he left.  “He’s worse than he has been, ain’t he?” she said, abruptly.