“I don’t believe any of us can do that,” he said.
“YOU can’t, if you take bites big enough to fill your mouth,” giggled Felicity, with cruelty and without provocation.
“Well, maybe you could,” retorted Dan sarcastically. “You’d be so afraid of spoiling your looks that you’d rather die than make a face, I s’pose, no matter what you et.”
“Felicity makes enough faces when there’s nothing to make faces at,” said Felix, who had been grimaced at over the breakfast table that morning and hadn’t liked it.
“I think the bitter apples would be real good for Felix,” said Felicity. “They say sour things make people thin.”
“Let’s go and get the bitter apples,” said Cecily hastily, seeing that Felix, Felicity and Dan were on the verge of a quarrel more bitter than the apples.
We went to the seedling tree and got an apple apiece. The game was that every one must take a bite in turn, chew it up, and swallow it, without making a face. Peter again distinguished himself. He, and he alone, passed the ordeal, munching those dreadful mouthfuls without so much as a change of expression on his countenance, while the facial contortions the rest of us went through baffled description. In every subsequent trial it was the same. Peter never made a face, and no one else could help making them. It sent him up fifty per cent in Felicity’s estimation.
“Peter is a real smart boy,” she said to me. “It’s such a pity he is a hired boy.”
But, if we could not pass the ordeal, we got any amount of fun out of it, at least. Evening after evening the orchard re-echoed to our peals of laughter.
“Bless the children,” said Uncle Alec, as he carried the milk pails across the yard. “Nothing can quench their spirits for long.”