How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"You're lucky," she said, "it's muskrat stew and there's plenty left over tonight, eat as much as you can." The stew was made out of dandelion greens and a couple of potatoes and some small wild carrots and some crawdads and a couple of little chunks of meat. (8.92)
Mmm, mmm, good. Muskrat. Tastes like chicken, right? Living off the land means foraging for whatever you can find to eat. Even though this doesn't sound like a very appetizing soup, it's fairly nutritious for a free meal. To Bud and Bugs, this is a feast because they get to eat so much of it.
Quote #8
My new clothes were just a little bit too big, but they were long pants and not knickers so I didn't care […] Man, my first pair of trousers! (11.114)
Often, younger kids wore short pants called knickers but had a pair of long pants, or trousers, for cold weather. We wonder if Bud was too poor to ever have a pair of longer pants. Maybe he just wore the same short pair of pants all the time. In any case, this is his first pair of long pants—at ten years old.
Quote #9
Mr. Jimmy ordered a supper that was all the way different from mine and Steady Eddie ordered one that was all the way different from his! No wonder you hear about rich folks going to restaurants once a week, this was great! (14.65)
Nowadays, eating out at restaurants is something most people do, and most people aren't rich. Things have changed a lot since the 1930s. This is so unusual for Bud that he doesn't even understand that it's possible for people to order different dishes depending on what they want. This is a lot of steps of from muskrat stew, right?