ons tied
up with it, and most of gleeful memories. I know that they are very
present ones.

We all knew when it was coming; we all loved turkey--not Turkey on the
map, for which we cared very little after we had once bounded it--by the
Black Sea on the east, and by something else on the other sides--but
basted turkey, brown turkey, stuffed turkey. Here was richness!

We had scored off the days until we were sure, to a recitation mark,
when it was due--well into the end of November, when winds would be
blowing from the northwest, with great piles of dry leaves all down the
sides of the street and in the angles of pasture walls.

I cannot for my life conceive why any one should upset the old order of
things by marking it down a fortnight earlier. A man in the country
wants his crops well in and housed before he is ready to gush out with a
round, outspoken Thanksgiving; but everybody knows, who knows anything
about it, that the purple tops and the cow-horn turnips are, nine times
in ten, left out till the latter days of November, and husking not half
over.

We all knew, as I said, when it was coming. We had a stock of empty
flour barrels on Town-hill stuffed with leaves, and a big pole set in
the ground, and a battered tar barrel, with its bung chopped out, to put
on top of the pole. It was all to beat the last year's bonfire--and it
did. The country wagoners had made their little stoppages at the back
door. We knew what was to come of that. And if the old cook--a monstrous
fine woman, who weighed two hundred if she weighed a pound--was brusque
and wouldn't have us "round," we knew what was to come of that, too.
Such pies as hers demanded thoughtful consideration: not very large, and
baked in scalloped tins, and with such a relishy flavor to them, as on
my honor, I do not recognize in any pies of this generation....

The sermon on that Thanksgiving (and we all heard it) was long. We boys
were prepared for that too. But we couldn't treat a Thanksgiving sermon
as we would an ordinary one; we couldn't doze--there was too much ahead.
It seemed to me that the preacher made rather a merit of holding us in
check--with that basted turkey in waiting. At last, though, it came to
an end; and I believe Dick and I both joined in the doxology.

All that followed is to me now a cloud of misty and joyful expectation,
until we took our places--a score or more of cousins and kinsfolk; and
the turkey, and celery, and cranberries, and w