I thought
it would be better to cook two turkey-hens instead of one great big
gobbler with meat as tough as tripe and stuffed full of fat."

"One of the hens would 'a' been plenty," replied Mrs. Irwin. "How much did
they weigh?"

"About fifteen pounds apiece," was the answer. "The gobbler would 'a'
weighed thirty, I guess. He's pure Mammoth Bronze."

"I wish," said Jim, "that we could get a few breeding birds of the wild
bronze turkeys from Mexico."

"Why?" asked the colonel.

"They're the original blood of the domestic bronze turkeys," said Jim,
"and they're bigger and handsomer than the pure-bred bronzes, even.
They're a better stock than the northern wild turkeys from which our
common birds originated."

"Where do you learn all these things, Jim?" asked Mrs. Woodruff. "I
declare, I often tell Woodruff that it's as good as a lecture to have Jim
Irwin at table. My intelligence has fallen since you quit working here,
Jim."

There came into Jim's eyes the gleam of the man devoted to a Cause--and
the dinner tended to develop into a lecture. Jennie saw a little more
plainly wherein his queerness lay.

"There's an education in any meal, if we would just use the things on the
table as materials for study, and follow their trails back to their
starting-points. This turkey takes us back to the chaparral of
Mexico----"

"What's chaparral?" asked Jennie, as a diversion. "It's one of the words I
have seen so often and know perfectly to speak it and read it--but after
all it's just a word, and nothing more."

"Ain't that the trouble with our education, Jim?" queried the colonel,
cleverly steering Jim back into the track of his discourse.

"They are not even living words," answered Jim, "unless we have clothed
them in flesh and blood through some sort of concrete notion. 'Chaparral'
to Jennie is just the ghost of a word. Our civilization is full of
inefficiency because we are satisfied to give our children these ghosts
and shucks and husks of words, instead of the things themselves, that can
be seen and hefted and handled and tested and heard."

Jennie looked Jim over carefully. His queerness was taking on a new
phase--and she felt a sense of surprise such as one experiences when the
conjurer causes a rose to grow into a tree before your very eyes. Jim's
development was not so rapid, but Jennie's perception of it was. She began
to feel proud of the fact that a man who could make his impractical
notions seem so plau