"Deacon," said Will, "we came to ask you for a peck or so of your pound sweets, for our fishing excursion to-morrow."
"Have a drink of cold water? Pound sweets, eh? Well, now, I'm sorry. Won't anything else do you? Fact is, every pound sweet I've got's promised; there wa'n't many this year, and they're a skurse kind, you see. But you can have anything else you can find on the farm, and welcome. The bell-flowers are tiptop—help yourselves."
We thanked him, but didn't care for anything else. We had plenty of other apples ourselves, and had set our minds on having some of the Deacon's great yellow pound sweets. We wandered discontentedly into the orchard without finding anything we wanted, peeped at the big snapping-turtle by the spring, patted the pretty gentle Jersey cow and her half-grown calf, both of which were the pride and delight of the Deacon's heart, and then sat down in the open doorway of the great barn.
"He's a mean old skinflint, I say," said George, the boy from town. Will and I knew he wasn't any such thing, but we were out of humor at having our walk for nothing, and did not take the trouble to argue the matter.
"I don't think he would have missed a peck," I said.
"Wants to sell 'em, I s'pose. Seems to me I'd oblige a few boys even if it was a few cents out of my pocket."
"Let's play a trick on the old codger," said George. "Last summer our teacher wouldn't give us a holiday when we wanted it, so we shut him up in the school till late at night."
"And what came of it?" we inquired, in great interest.
"Oh, well, one or two of us got expelled for awhile, but that just suited us."
This did not sound to me like a very successful issue of the trick, but George went on: