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"THE GREAT PIE BELT."
Our national festival again approaches ; already its spicy odors fill a million kitchens and high activity reigns within the Great Pie Belt. Said Rudyard Kipling to a London Interviewer, in giving his impressions of our country. "I live within the Great Pie Belt. It extends through the New England States and through Northern New York. Pie is a habit all over the Eastern States, in the West it is a debauch. Have you ever considered the moral and physical condition of a people which eats pie for breakfast, pie for dinner, pie for supper?" This Wise Young Man asked his question not for information, but for conversation. What could that interviewer tell him of our Belt and the moral and physical condition of its people? Rather was it the Wise Young Man's place to formulate more distinctly the vague suggestion thus thrown out that our physical and moral condition is less than perfect; that pie debauches us, body and soul. Why did he not ask us, this wise Rudyard, concerning the effects of pie eaten for a lifetime? For we genuine Pie-Belters could tell him various facts which he seems not to have learned in his Vermont hermitage, even about New Englanders. We might, for instance, tell him of our most notorious pie-eater, one named Emerson. This notorious creature even took pie for breakfast during a lifetime as long and ten thousand times as pleasant as Carlyle's, who ate only oatmeal, and that with growl, ings both loud and deep. "Emerson is always so cheerful," Carlyle grumbled, after a visit from our champion pie-eater. "How can Mr. Emerson always keep so cheerful, when the rest of us are so tired?" asked a fellow traveller, after Emerson had taken pie for breakfast. Who, indeed, have been our pie-eaters? Webster, Sumner, the Adamses, Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes. Hawthorne, Phillips, Mrs. Stowe and others equally famous. Is there a dyspeptic on the list, a bilious philosopher, a groaning prophet? Who. ever brought more sunshine into the homes of two countries than that .hardened pieeater, Louisa Alcott? "I went out to buy a squash pie for my lonely supper." she wrote in 1868 "It snowed, was very cold; I was cross and tired. My pie turned a somersault, a boy laughed, so did I, and felt better." The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table told us much of his landlady's son continually splitting his face open with a wedge of pie. Years afterward the poet met this same Benjamin Franklin, no miserable dyspeptic, no moral ruin, but a healthy and happy pie-eater still, and physician of other men. Then there was gentle Whittier, pie-eater even t;|iree times a day for almost a century, whom we may consider the laureate of the Great Pie Belt. Hear his howl of the debauche: "What moistens ihe lips anil what brightens the eye V.'hat calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie?" Let Rudyard shudder at the evil wish: "May thy life be as sweet and its last sunset sky Golden-tinted and lair as thy own pumpkin pie." Oh, Wise Young Man, consider the moral and physical condition of a Whittier I Rudyard Kipling is English, hence this scorn of our Belt. Yet also was Southey English, although recklessly addicted to pie, and author of a "Pindaric Ode to Gooseberry Pie." Other of the Wise Youth's countrymen, lordly ones at that, have known the blessedness of pie even for breakfast. Tom Mo ire told of "the cold apple pie his lordship did stuff in, for breakfast to save the expense of hot muffin." We have the authority of more than om eighteenth century diary" to prove that Englishmen for breakfast ate water gruel antl occasionally a "fruit pye." Also was Leigh Hunt of the Kipling island, who nevertheless enjoyed pie scarcely less thin our nefarious Emersons and Whittiers. He wrote: "Now I look upon shoes thickiylcoated with dust As entitling the wearer to double pie crust." Worse than all, is it not true, although forgotten, that the Wise Youth's own country once made its poet-laureate of a Pye ? Let us not be disheartened, brother and sister Pie.Belters, but enjoy our moral and physical condition and our Pie next Thursday, with good appetite and a hearty Thanksgiving for them.
A> Something of a sideline, and probably to be answered by a New
A> Englander. In Mary Cabot's memoir, she quotes a brief par. in the
A> /Vermont Phoenix/ for 14 Augus 1894. /A propos/ Kipling's intentions as
A> to where he would live, /The Critic /wrote: "It is said that he intends
A> to spend part of every summer in England and the rest of the year on the
A> edge of 'the great pie belt'."
A> Presumably a nickname for part of New England where they specialised in
A> the production of pies - pumpkin, blueberry, etc?
A> /Alastair Wilson/
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