Boiling Apple Butter

"Not if you stir it good when the snitz are in. That's the time the
work begins. Here's your mom and Philip."

"Ach, Mom,"--Amanda ran to meet her mother--"this here's awful much
fun! I wish we'd boil apple butter every few days."

"Just wait once," said Millie, "till you're a little bigger and want to
go off to picnics or somewhere and got to stay home and help to stir
apple butter. Then you'll not like it so well. Why, Mrs. Hershey was
tellin' me last week how mad her girls get still if the apple butter's
got to be boiled in the hind part of the week when they want to be done
and dressed and off to visit or to Lancaster instead of gettin' their
eyes full of smoke stirrin' apple butter."

Mrs. Reist laughed.

"But," Amanda said with a tender glance at the hired girl, "I guess
Hershey's ain't got no Millie like we to help."

"Ach, pack off now with you," Millie said, trying to frown. "I got to
stop this spoilin' you. You don't think I'd stand in the hot sun and
stir apple butter while you go off on a picnic or so when you're big
enough to help good?"

"But that's just what you would do! I know you! Didn't you spend almost
your whole Christmas savin' fund on me and Phil last year?"

"Ach, you talk too much! Let me be, now, I got to boil apple butter."

Philip ran for several boxes and old chairs and put them under a
spreading cherry tree. "We take turns stirrin'," he explained, "so
those that don't stir can take it easy while they wait their turn.
Jiminy Christmas, guess we'll have a regular party to-day. All of us
are in it, and Aunt Rebecca's comin', and Lyman Mertzheimer, and I
guess Martin Landis, and mebbe some of the little Landis ones and the
whole Crow Hill will be here. Here comes Millie with the snitz!"