All the boys and girls ran from the dining room at the first sound of the yells of the old man. The lamps within enlightened the weird scene without. When both feet were flung in the air simultaneously the old man sat down suddenly. He sat on the largest plate, with the hottest gob of taffy in the collection. His seat had barely touched the plate, the taffy had scarcely squashed through his jeans pants, until he made an effort to rise again. Failing in this he flopped on his stomach, clutching and tearing at his seat of latest misery, taffy stringing from his fingers. Rearing his rear end high in the taffy laden air he planted his head in another plate of taffy which, was still tenderly clinging to the few straggling hairs on the old man's pate, as they carried him into the house, the taffy plate on his head like the crown of the old king. Gradually dangling, it descended to the floor, only to be trampled in the dust by the rabble. The old man was put to bed. Poultices of apple butter, sweet-oil and a whitish-bluish clay dug from the bottom of the spring were applied to his blistered parts. The taffy pulling party, the scene of gayety so suddenly transformed to one of suffering, lives in the memory of Alfred by the recollection of long threads of amber colored taffy shimmering in the soft moonlight as they clung to the plum tree branches where the old man's vigorous kicks had landed them. It was maple sugar making time. Uncle Jacob Irons, who lived near Masontown fifteen miles away, had a large sugar grove. A visit to Uncle Jake's was always one continued round of pleasure. The staid uncle, jolly Aunt Bettie, Kate and Tillie, Joe and George, John and Wilson, were always delighted to have Alfred visit them. It was a day that marked the passing of winter and the coming of spring, after a night of light freezing with a white frost, the morning sun shining all the brighter that he had been hazed so long by winter's shadows. The earth, the trees, appeared even more brown and barren by contrast with the splendors of the sky. Here and there a patch of snow, left sheltered by tree or fence, seemingly endeavoring to hide from the sunbeams that came out of the south, to pour its flood of warmth on it until it melted and mouldered away. It was springtime, the boyhood of the year, when half the world is rhyme and music is the other. It was springtime in the country, far from the city and the ways of men. The mountains in the distance, brown colored in spots, the peaks, like winter kings with beards of snow, seemed to say: "'Tis time for me to go northward o'er the icy rocks, northward o'er the sea. Come the spring with all its splendor, all its buds and all its blossoms, all its flowers and all its grasses."