feels
the night after Thanksgiving."

"Yes; but you needn't begin that way, papa," said the little girl; "I'm
not going to have any moral to it this time."

"No, indeed! But it can be a true story, can't it?"

"I don't know," said the little girl; "I like made-up ones."

"Well, this is going to be a true one, anyway, and it's no use
talking."

All the relations in the neighborhood had come to dinner, and then
gone back to their own houses, but some of the relations had come from
a distance, and these had to stay all night at the grandfather's. But
whether they went or whether they stayed, they all told the
grandmother that they did believe it was the best Thanksgiving dinner
they had ever eaten in their born days. They had had cranberry sauce,
and they'd had mashed potato, and they'd had mince-pie and pandowdy,
and they'd had celery, and they'd had Hubbard squash, and they'd had
tea and coffee both, and they'd had apple-dumpling with hard sauce,
and they'd had hot biscuit and sweet pickle, and mangoes, and frosted
cake, and nuts, and cauliflower--

"Don't mix them all up so!" pleaded the little girl. "It's perfectly
confusing. I can't hardly tell _what_ they had now."

"Well, _they_ mixed them up just in the same way, and I suppose that's
one of the reasons why it happened."

Whenever a child wanted to go back from dumpling and frosted cake to
mashed potato and Hubbard squash--they were old-fashioned kind of
people, and they had everything on the table at once, because the
grandmother and the aunties cooked it, and they couldn't keep jumping
up all the time to change the plates--and its mother said it
shouldn't, its grandmother said, Indeed it should, then, and helped it
herself; and the child's father would say, Well, he guessed _he_ would
go back, too, for a change; and the child's mother would say, She
should think he would be ashamed; and then they would get to going
back, till everything was perfectly higgledy-piggledy.

"Oh, _shouldn't_ you like to have been there, papa?" sighed the little
girl.

"You mustn't interrupt. Where was I?"

"Higgledy-piggledy."

"Oh yes!"

Well, but the greatest thing of all was the turkey that they had. It
was a gobbler, I tell you, that was nearly as big as a giraffe.

"Papa!"

It took the premium at the county fair, and when it was dressed it
weighed fifteen pounds--well, maybe twenty--and it was so heavy that
t