It was enough. Forgetting the twenty years, I hurried down across the pond and up to the persimmon trees on the other side--up _into_ the trees indeed, for I never stopped until I had climbed clear up into the top among the ripe persimmons! Do you know what a persimmon, picked from a particular tree along Cohansey Creek on Christmas Day, tastes like? especially when you have not had a taste of persimmon for twenty years? No, you do not--because you are not twenty years old, perhaps, and because you were not a boy along Cohansey Creek, perhaps, and because, if you were, you did not know those two particular persimmon trees, maybe. Nobody ever seemed to know the perfection of those persimmons, except myself and the ’possums. Not one of the Luptons, who owned the pasture, the pond, and the trees, had ever been a boy, so far as I could remember, and certainly not one of them had ever tasted the fruit of those two trees. There were other persimmon trees up and down the township, others here along the pond; but these two were the only trees to hold their fruit until Christmas, preserved with such richness of flavor, such a gummy, candied, wild, woodsy quality, that it could not decay. Those persimmons never decayed. They candied, evaporated, wrinkled, fell, and vanished away. Or else the ’possums ate them--those that I did not eat. A ’possum had already been here this Christmas morning before me. I had noted his fresh tracks beneath the tree when I came up; and now, in the tree, I saw where the snow had been brushed from several of the large limbs as the ’possum had moved about in the top, eating his Christmas dinner. You never ate a Christmas dinner high up in the top of a persimmon tree? But you will, perhaps, some day, as good a Christmas dinner, I hope, as ours was. For such persimmons! Bob Cratchit’s goose (“There never was such a goose!”) could not have been any better flavored. Nor could the little Cratchits have been any hungrier for goose than I was for persimmons. Now the ’possum had been having persimmons every night since the frosts of October; so of course he felt no such hunger for persimmons as I felt. But ripe persimmons would be a Christmas dinner for a ’possum every day in the year. There is nothing so unspeakably good as persimmons if you happen to be a ’possum, or if you happen to be a boy--even after twenty years! So the ’possum and I had our Christmas dinner together at Nature’s invitation, in the top of the persimmon tree. The ’possum, to be sure, had eaten and gone before I came. But that is good form in the woods. He was expecting me, so he came early, just before dawn, that neither of us might be embarrassed, leaving his greetings for me in sign-language in the snow.