"I'll go some time: don't want to go to-day." The boys went off; and Mrs. Sumerford said, "Sam, what made you so short with the boys? I know they didn't like it. If you wanted to work with your clay, why didn't you tell 'em that was the reason you didn't want to go to-day? then they would have gone down to the Cuthbert house with you." "I knew they would, marm; and that was just the reason I didn't tell 'em. I didn't want 'em down there: I wanted to be alone to contrive something. Mother, if you was going to draw a piece of linen into the loom, and study out a new figure that you never wove before, would you want all the neighbors in, gabbing?" "No, I'm sure I shouldn't." Sammy went to his workshop; and his mother began to wash the breakfast-dishes, saying, "Well, these are new times: I shouldn't think I'd been talking with Sam Sumerford." The first thing Sammy did was to gather up all the pumpkins, gourds, and squashes he had been at so much pains to select and dig out, and throw them on the woodpile: he had brought with him a piece of ash board (a remnant that was left when Harry made a drum, and had given him), also a large piece of thick, smooth birch-bark pressed flat as a board, and Harry's large compasses. He sat down at the table, and began to talk to himself:-- "I heard my brother say, and tell Jim Blanchard, he didn't want to eat other people's cold victuals, but he liked best to build his own campfire. I don't want to eat anybody's cold victuals neither. I'll make my own moulds: I won't ask Uncle Seth to make 'em. If I can't make 'em, I won't try to be a potter." Sammy had found that the bean-pot he had made for his mother was about the right size, but the shape did not suit: he knew that everybody who looked at it would see that it was just the shape of a pumpkin. To use his own expression, it was too "pottle-bellied;" and the mouth was not large enough to admit a piece of pork the right size. The cover of this pot dropped inside the rim of the pot; and, as nearly all the settlers baked their beans in a hole under the hearth, it was not so good a form for keeping out the ashes, as to have the cover shut over the rim, with a flange on the inside of it. With the compasses he struck out a circle on the table, the exact size of the bottom of his mother's bean-pot, of which he had the measure, and, boring a hole in the centre, stuck up a round, straight willow stick considerably longer than the height of the original vessel. Around this stick and in this circle he built up a mass of clay as high as the stick, and much larger in circumference than the old pot. His object in putting the stick in the centre of his circle was to obtain a guide, a plumb-line centre from which to work. "When they build a haystack," said he, "they always set a pole in the middle, and then they get all sides alike."