goes on.  It is very easy, as it will be seen, to learn how to play it.  Cynthia was holding the cushion, and at the fatal word she threw it down, not before John, but in front of Ephraim Leggett.  And they two kneeled, and so forth.  John was astounded.  He had never conceived of such perfidy in the female heart.  He felt like wiping Ephraim off the face of the earth, only Ephraim was older and bigger than he.  When it came his turn at length,—­thanks to a plain little girl for whose admiration he did n’t care a straw,—­he threw the cushion down before Melinda Mayhew with all the devotion he could muster, and a dagger look at Cynthia.  And Cynthia’s perfidious smile only enraged him the more.  John felt wronged, and worked himself up to pass a wretched evening.

When supper came, he never went near Cynthia, and busied himself in carrying different kinds of pie and cake, and red apples and cider, to the girls he liked the least.  He shunned Cynthia, and when he was accidentally near her, and she asked him if he would get her a glass of cider, he rudely told her—­like a goose as he was—­that she had better ask Ephraim.  That seemed to him very smart; but he got more and more miserable, and began to feel that he was making himself ridiculous.

Girls have a great deal more good sense in such matters than boys.  Cynthia went to John, at length, and asked him simply what the matter was.  John blushed, and said that nothing was the matter.  Cynthia said that it wouldn’t do for two people always to be together at a party; and so they made up, and John obtained permission to “see” Cynthia home.

It was after half-past nine when the great festivities at the Deacon’s broke up, and John walked home with Cynthia over the shining crust and under the stars.  It was mostly a silent walk, for this was also an occasion when it is difficult to find anything fit to say.  And John was thinking all the way how he should bid Cynthia good-night; whether it would do and whether it wouldn’t do, this not being a game, and no forfeits attaching to it.  When they reached the gate, there was an awkward little pause.  John said the stars were uncommonly bright.  Cynthia did not deny it, but waited a minute and then turned abruptly away, with “Good-night, John!”

“Good-night, Cynthia!”

And the party was over, and Cynthia was gone, and John went home in a kind of dissatisfaction with himself.

It was long before he could go to sleep for thinking of the new world opened to him, and imagining how he would act under a hundred different circumstances, and what he would say, and what Cynthia would say; but a dream at length came, and led him away to a great city and a brilliant house; and while he was there, he heard a loud rapping on the under floor, and saw that it was daylight.

XIV

THE SUGAR CAMP

I think there is no part of farming the boy enjoys more than the making of maple sugar; it is better than “blackberrying,” and nearly as good as fishing.  And one reason he likes this work is, that somebody else does the most of it.  It is a sort of work in which he can appear to be very active, and yet not do much.