“I guess that I know a cherry pit when I see one!” said the hired man. “And if those are not cherry pits, I’ll fry my mittens and eat ’em for supper!”
“The trouble with you, Hank, is that you are never willing to give up when you are wrong!” said the farmer. “How could so many cherry pits be under a basswood tree?”
Just then, one of the baby robins “popped” a pit, and the little cherry stone rattled against the branches of the basswood and fell to the ground near the hired man’s feet.
The farmer picked it up and said: “Now, look here, Hank! There is no use of your standing there and telling me that that is a cherry pit, when both of us saw it drop off that basswood! Cherry pits don’t drop off basswood trees, and for you to try to tell me that I don’t know the difference between a cherry tree and a basswood tree is going just a little bit too far!”
“Maybe you’re right!” said the hired man.
“There ain’t no ‘maybe’ about it!” said the farmer. “I am most generally right when it comes to understanding nature!”
“All except when you pulled up that poison ivy, barehanded!” said the hired man, and both of them laughed, and the farmer said:
“Those basswood bobs did look so much like cherry pits, that they would have fooled anybody but an expert!”
And the hired man said: “They looked so much like cherry pits that the next time I am over this way, I am going to get some of them, and plant ’em in a box and raise me a cherry orchard!”
After the farmer and his hired man had gone, Mister Gabriel Chipmunk came out from under his old home stump. Mister Chipmunk was worried. He did not know what he was going to have to eat next winter.