“Five or six minutes more will do the business. I picked out the smallest ones on purpose to hurry supper. Let’s set the table. Tom, if your kettle of water is boiling, suppose you shuck some corn and plunge it in it. It must boil from five to six minutes—just long enough to get it thoroughly hot through. If it boils longer the sweetness all goes out of it. Dick, won’t you wash some of the tomatoes while Larry and I arrange the dishes?”
Arranging the dishes consisted in cutting a number of broad palmete leaves, some to hold the supplies of food and others to serve as plates.
“I’m sorry I cannot offer you young gentlemen some fresh butter for your corn and potatoes,” said Cal, as they sat down to supper, “but to be perfectly candid with you, our cows seem to have deserted us and we haven’t churned for several days past. After all, the corn and potatoes will be very palatable with a little salt sprinkled upon them, and we have plenty of salt. Don’t hesitate to help yourselves freely to it.”
“To my mind,” said Dick, “this is as good a supper as I ever ate.”
“That’s because of our sharp appetites,” answered Larry. “We’re hungry enough to relish anything.”
“Appetite helps, of course,” said Dick, thoughtfully; “but so does contrast. An hour ago we had all made up our minds to content ourselves for many meals to come with the exclusive diet of fish and game, which has been our lot for many meals past. To find ourselves eating a supper like this instead is like waking from a bad dream and finding it only a nightmare.”
“It would be better still not to have the nightmare,” answered Cal, speaking more seriously than he usually did. “When you have a nightmare it is usually your own fault, and pessimism is always so. You fellows were pessimistic over the prospect of a supper you could not enjoy. As you have a supper that you can enjoy, the suffering you inflicted upon yourselves was wholly needless.”
“Yes, I know,” interposed Tom; “but we couldn’t know that you were going to get all these good things for us.”
“No, of course not. But if you hadn’t allowed your pessimistic forebodings to make you unhappy, you needn’t have been unhappy at all. If things had turned out as you expected you’d have been unhappy twice—once in lamenting your lot and once in suffering it. As it is, you’ve been needlessly unhappy once and unexpectedly happy once, instead of being happy all the while. I tell you optimism is the only true philosophy.”