,
when her mother was in the south room, getting it ready for her
grandparents, who were coming home to Thanksgiving--they had been on a
visit to their youngest son--that Submit crept slyly into the pantry.
The turkey lay there on the broad shelf before the window. Submit
looked at him. She thought he was small. "He was 'most all feathers,"
she whispered, ruefully. She stood looking disconsolately at the
turkey. Suddenly her eyes flashed and a red flush came over her face.
It was as if Satan, coming into that godly new England home three
days before Thanksgiving, had whispered in her ear.

Presently Submit stole softly back into the kitchen, set a chair
before the chimney cupboard, climbed up, and got the pewter dish full
of Revolutionary bullets. Then she stole back to the pantry and
emptied the bullets into the turkey's crop. Then she got a needle and
thread from her mother's basket, sewed up the crop carefully, and set
the empty dish back in the cupboard. She had just stepped down out of
the chair when her brother Jonas came in.

"Submit," said he, "let's have one game of odd or even with the
bullets."

"I am too busy," said Submit. "I've got to spin my stint."

"Just one game. Mother won't care."

"No; I can't."

Submit flew to her spinning wheel in the corner. Jonas, still
remonstrating, strolled into the pantry.

"I don't believe mother wants you in there," Submit said anxiously.

"See here, Submit," Jonas called out in an eager voice, "I'll get the
steelyards, and we'll weigh the turkey. We can do it as well as
anybody."

Submit left her spinning wheel. She was quite pale with trepidation
when Jonas and she adjusted the turkey in the steelyards. What if
those bullets should rattle out? But they did not.

"He weighs twenty pounds and a quarter," announced Jonas, with a
gasp, after peering anxiously at the figures. "He's the biggest turkey
that was ever raised in these parts."

Jonas exulted a great deal, but Submit did not say much. As soon as
Jonas had laid the turkey back on the shelf and gone out, she watched
her chance and removed the bullets, replacing them in the pewter dish.

When Mr. Thompson and Thomas came home at twilight there was a deal of
talk over the turkey.

"The Adams' turkey doesn't weigh but nineteen pounds," Jonas
announced. "Sarah was out there when they weighed him, and she 'most
cried."

"I think Sarah and Submit and all of you are very foolish about it,"
said Mrs. Thomp