o the water with which the
quart of dough was mixed. A wonderful turkey food, no doubt!

Tibbetts also told Halstead to take a pair of sharp shears and cut off
an inch and a half of his turkey's "quitter," if it were too long and
bothered him about eating. If the turkey grew "dainty," as Tibbetts
expressed it, Halstead was to make the dough into rolls about the size
of his thumb, then open the bird's beak, shove the rolls in, and make
him swallow them--three or four of them, three times a day.

Halstead came home from the Corners and made a quart of dough according
to the Tibbetts formula. I do not know certainly about the spoonful of
rum. If Tibbetts gave him the rum, Halstead kept quiet about it; the old
Squire was a strict observer of the Maine law.

None of us found out what Halstead was doing for four or five days, and
then only by accident. For he had caught his speckled gobbler and put
him down at the foot of the stairs in the wagon-house cellar; and he got
a sheet of hemlock bark, four feet long by two or three feet wide, such
as are peeled off hemlock logs, and sold at tanneries, for the turkey to
stand on.

It was dark as Egypt down in that cellar, when the door at the head of
the stairs was shut; and turkeys, as is well-known, are very timid about
moving in the dark. That poor gobbler just stood there, stock-still, on
that sheet of bark and did not dare step off it. Three times a day
Halstead used to go down there, on the sly, with a lantern, and feed
him.

This went on for some time; Addison and I learned of it from hearing a
little faint gobble in the cellar one morning when the flock was out in
the farm lane, just behind the wagon-house. The young gobblers were
gobbling and the hen turkeys yeaping; and from down cellar came a faint,
answering gobble. We wondered how a turkey had got into that cellar, and
on opening the door and peering down the stairs, we discovered
Halstead's speckled gobbler standing on the curved sheet of hemlock
bark.

While Addison and I were wondering about it, Halstead came out, and
roughly told us to let his turkey alone! In reply to our questions he at
last gave us some information about his project and boasted that within
three weeks he would have a turkey four pounds heavier than any other in
the flock; but he would not tell us how to make his kind of dough.

Addison scoffed at the scheme; but to show how well it was working,
Halstead took us downstairs and had us "heft"