d, healthy girlhood, when she was aroused by her
mother's irritable voice screaming up the stairway.

"Debby! Debby!" she called. "Get up quick and help me pick these
turkeys. Your father's made up his mind to sell them dead weight, and
we've got to pick them to-night, so he can take them to the hotel early
in the morning. Do you _hear_ me, Debby?"

"Yes, ma'am," answered Debby, scrambling out of her warm nest to the
square of rag carpet before her bed.

Four minutes later she felt her way down-stairs and opened the kitchen
door into a room filled with steam, and the peculiar smell of scalded
fowls.

"There's seven to do," her mother said, bending over the brass kettle on
the stove to draw from it a dripping turkey. "Yours are all scalded. Go
to work."

Debby buttoned on a large apron, seated herself with a tin pan in her
lap containing a turkey, and then began quickly to pluck off its
feathers, laying them to dry on a religious newspaper spread on the
table beside her.

Mrs. Blanchard soon sat down at the other side of the table, and began
to pick and talk as fast as fingers and tongue would allow.

What did possess Mr. Blanchard to change his mind, and give them so much
extra trouble, she could not conceive; and selling them to Tate, too,
when he might have made a quarter of a cent more a pound if he had let
Morris have them. And then those hoop-poles! He might have made she
didn't know how much if he had taken her advice, and kept them a week
longer.

As for the potatoes, they had turned out so small, and the corn was so
short in the ear, that the land only knew where the money to get them
all something to wear was to come from. Not that _she_ cared for dress,
for hadn't she worn the same bonnet and shawl to church until she was
ashamed to show her face there? As for the sewing society, she was a
master hand at cutting and planning, and she could go as well as not,
too, now that Debby was quite old enough to take care of the baby, and
get the supper ready for her father and the boys; but not a step was she
going to sit next Mrs. Williams with her black silk, and Mrs. White with
her handsome alpaca, although their husbands' farms were no larger than
Mr. Blanchard's; and for the life of her she could not understand why
_she_ should not dress as well when she worked twice as hard as they
did.

To all of which Debby listened with a sinking heart and great sobs in
her throat, wondering why they should be such