"Why, he laughed right out—it's easy to get him laughing—and he said if we could invent anything ugly enough to scare the Sewing Society, we might have a cart-load of pumpkins, if we'd see that they were pitched into the big feed kettle after we got done with them, so they could be boiled for the cows."
"Isn't that a whopper, though! Biggest pumpkin I ever saw. Let's go right at it."
Clint Burgess had his knife out, and was opening the big blade, but Prop Corning stopped him.
"Hold on, Clint. Let's practice on some of the little ones first. Besides, we don't want to carry the big one too far after it's done. We might drop it and break it."
"That's so," said Clint. "I say, Phil, where'll we go?"
"Up behind the corn-crib—close to the barn; best place in the world to hide 'em till we want 'em. The Sewing Society don't half get here till pretty near tea-time."
"We'll show 'em something."
"Teach the girls, too, not to laugh at fellows of our age."
"It's too bad. When a man gets to be thirteen, it's time they let him come in to tea."
That was where the rules of the Plumville Sewing Society were pinching the self-esteem of Phil Merritt and his two friends, and Phil's father and his uncle and his two grown-up brothers had gravely expressed their entire sympathy, even to the extent of furnishing unlimited pumpkins.