t and a shabby ruin--a genuine antique if ever there was
one, with those high-polished knobs all down the front, like an
old-fashioned highboy, and Chippendale legs. To make up for its manifold
imperfections the chef back in the kitchen had crowded it full of
mysterious laboratory products and then varnished it over with a
waterproof glaze or shellac, which rendered it durable without making it
edible. Just to see that turkey was a thing calculated to set the mind
harking backward to places and times when there had been real turkeys to
eat.

Back yonder in the old days we were a simple and a husky race, weren't
we? Boys and girls were often fourteen years old before they knew
oysters didn't grow in a can. Even grown people knew nothing, except by
vague hearsay, of cheese so runny that if you didn't care to eat it you
could drink it. There was one traveled person then living who was
reputed to have once gone up to the North somewhere and partaken of a
watermelon that had had a plug cut in it and a whole quart of imported
real Paris--France--champagne wine poured in the plugged place. This,
however, was generally regarded as a gross exaggeration of the real
facts.

But there was a kind of a turkey that they used to serve in those parts
on high state occasions. It was a turkey that in his younger days ranged
wild in the woods and ate the mast. At the frosted coming of the fall
they penned him up and fed him grain to put an edge of fat on his lean;
and then fate descended upon him and he died the ordained death of his
kind. But, oh! the glorious resurrection when he reached the table! You
sat with weapons poised and ready--a knife in the right hand, a fork in
the left and a spoon handy--and looked upon him and watered at the mouth
until you had riparian rights.

His breast had the vast brown fullness that you see in pictures of old
Flemish friars. His legs were like rounded columns and unadorned,
moreover, with those superfluous paper frills; and his tail was half as
big as your hand and it protruded grandly, like the rudder of a
treasure-ship, and had flanges of sizzled richness on it. Here was no
pindling fowl that had taken the veil and lived the cloistered life;
here was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross-country turkey, but a lusty
giant of a bird that would have been a cassowary, probably, or an emu,
if he had lived, his bosom a white mountain of lusciousness, his
interior a Golconda and not a Golgotha. At the tou