For a long time no word was spoken. I gazed in silence as the head was detached, and then resolved itself slowly into souse--always tacitly set aside as my special portion. In prophecy I saw the big pan, filled with ears, cheeks, snout, feet, and tail, all boiled and allowed to grow cold in their own jelly--that pan to which I was free to repair any time of day until everything was gone. I thought of myself, too, with apron tied round my neck and the chopping-bowl on my knees, reducing what remained of the head into small bits, to be seasoned by my Aunt, and then fill other pans as head-cheese. The sage and summer savory hung in paper flour-bags from the rafters overhead. I looked up at them with rapture. It seemed as if my mouth already tasted them in head-cheese and sausage and in the hot gravy which basted the succulent spare-rib. Only the abiding menace of the lamp kept me from dancing with delight. Gradually, however, as my Aunt passed from the tid-bits to the more substantial portions of her task, getting out the shoulders, the hams for smoking, the pieces for salting down in the brine-barrel, my enthusiasm languished a trifle. The lamp grew heavy as I changed it from hand to hand, holding the free fingers at a respectful distance over the chimney-top for warmth, and shuffling my feet about. It was truly very cold. I strove to divert myself by smiling at the big shadow my bustling Aunt cast against the house side of the shed, and by moving the lamp to affect its proportions, but broke out into yawns instead. A mouse ran swiftly across the scantling just under the lean-to roof. At the same time I thought I caught the muffled sound of distant rapping, as if at our own rarely used front door. I was too sleepy to decide whether I had really heard a noise or not. All at once I roused myself with a start. The lamp had nearly slipped from my hands, and the horror of what might have happened frightened me into wakefulness. “The Perkins girls keep on calling me ‘Wise child.’ They yell it after me all the while,” I said, desperately clutching at a subject which I hoped would interest my Aunt. I had spoken to her about it a week or so before, and it had stirred her quite out of her wonted stern calm. If anything would induce her to talk now, it would be this. “They do, eh?” she said, with an alert sharpness of voice, which dwindled away into a sigh. Then, after a moment, she added, “Well, never you mind. You just keep right on, tending to your own affairs, and studying your lessons, and in time it’ll be you who can laugh at them and all their low-down lot. They only do it to make you feel bad. Just don’t you humor them.” “But I don’t see,” I went on, “why--what do they call me ‘wise child’ _for?_ I asked Hi Budd, up at the Corners, but he only just chuckled and chuckled to himself, and wouldn’t say a word.”