FELT THANKSGIVING AND A MERRY YOUNG MUSE THAT VISITED US
UNINVITED

Thanksgiving was always a holiday at the old farm. Gram and the girls
made extensive preparations for it and intended to have a fine dinner.
Besides the turkey and chickens there were "spareribs" and great
frying-panfuls of fresh pork which, at this cold season of the year, was
greatly relished by us. On this present Thanksgiving-day, two of Gram's
nephews and their wives were expected to visit us, as also several
cousins of whom I had heard but vaguely.

It chanced, too, that on this occasion we had especially good reason to
be thankful that we were alive to eat a Thanksgiving dinner of any kind,
as I will attempt to relate. Up to the day before Thanksgiving the
weather, with the exception of two light snow storms, had been bright
and pleasant, and the snow had speedily gone off. On that day there came
a change. The Indian-summer mildness disappeared. The air was very
still, but a cold, dull-gray haze mounted into the sky and deepened and
darkened. All warmth went out from beneath it. There was a kind of
stone-cold chill in the air which made us shiver.

"Boys, there's a 'snow bank' rising," the Old Squire remarked at dinner.
"The ground will close for the winter. Glad we put those boughs round
the house yesterday and banked up the out-buildings."

The sky continued to darken as the vast, dim pall of leaden-gray cloud
overspread it, and cold, raw gusts of wind began to sigh ominously from
the northeast. Gramp at length came out where we were wheeling in the
last of the stove-wood. "Have you seen the sheep to-day?" he asked
Addison. "There is a heavy snow storm coming on. The flock must be
driven to the barn."

None of us had seen the sheep for several days; the flock had been
ranging about; and Halse ran over to the Edwardses to learn whether they
were there, but immediately returned, with Thomas who told us that he
had seen our sheep in the upper pasture, early that morning, and theirs
with them.

Immediately then we four boys rigged up in our thickest old coats and
mittens, and set off--with salt dish--to get the sheep home. The storm
had already obscured the distant mountains to eastward when we started;
and never have I seen Mt. Washington and the whole Presidential Range so
blackly silhouetted against the westerly sky as on that afternoon, from
the uplands of the sheep pasture.

The pasture was a large one, containing nearly a hundred ac