What has supper to do with it?
Oh, everything. For now that the lady is found, the whole story turns on the supper.
If it hadn’t been for the supper, the lady would not have found Little Mitchell, and you would never have known a thing about him.
You see, the people who lived in the cabin had nothing to eat but corn-pone, which is a kind of coarse cornbread baked in the ashes; for they had no stove,—nothing but a big stone fireplace to do their cooking in.
There was nothing but corn-pone and fried cabbage there to eat. So when the lady came, the father took his gun (he had just got home from the saw-mill) and went out to get some meat for supper.
After a little while he came back with a large gray squirrel; and pretty soon they all had a nice hot supper of corn-pone, fried cabbage, and squirrel-pie.
Now squirrel-pie is really no worse than chicken-pie or veal-pie or mutton-pie; but it sounds worse. And of course nobody knew that the squirrel that went into the pie was a poor little mother bunny with a nestful of young babies.
I should like to tell you how the lady spent the night in the log-cabin, which had only two rooms for its eleven occupants, counting the lady and her guide who were not expected, and not counting the very littlest baby and the next biggest baby and the three-year old baby, who were all tucked away somewhere—under one of the beds, I think—before supper.
