rently, my dear, it is the whole evening," he answered unruffled.

The next night was drizzly. Well, we would have books instead of a walk.
We lighted a fire, May though it was, and settled down before it. "What
shall we read?" I asked, feeling very cozy.

Jonathan was filling his pipe with a leisurely deliberation good to look
upon. With the match in his hand he paused--"Oh, I meant to tell you--those
young turkeys of yours--they were still out when I came through the yard. I
wonder if they went in all right."

I have always noticed that if the turkeys grow up very fat and strutty and
suggestive of Thanksgiving, Jonathan calls them "our turkeys," but in the
spring, when they are committing all the naughtinesses of wild and silly
youth, he is apt to allude to them as "those young turkeys of yours."

I rose wearily. "No. They never go in all right when they get out at this
time--especially on wet nights. I'll have to find them and stow them."

Jonathan got up, too, and laid down his pipe. "You'll need the lantern,"
he said.

We went out together into the May drizzle--a good thing to be out in, too,
if you are out for the fun of it. But when you are hunting silly little
turkeys who literally don't know enough to go in when it rains, and when
you expected and wanted to be doing something else, then it seems
different, the drizzle seems peculiarly drizzly, the silliness of the
turkeys seems particularly and unendurably silly.

We waded through the drenched grass and the tall, dripping weeds,
listening for the faint, foolish peeping of the wanderers. Some we found
under piled fence rails, some under burdock leaves, some under nothing
more protective than a plantain leaf. By ones and twos we collected them,
half drowned yet shrilly remonstrant, and dropped them into the dry shed
where they belonged. Then we returned to the house, very wet, feeling the
kind of discouragement that usually besets those who are forced to furnish
prudence to fools.

"Nine o'clock," said Jonathan, "and we're too wet to sit down. If you
could just shut in those turkeys on wet days--"

"Shut them in! Didn't I shut them in! They must have got out since four
o'clock."

"Isn't the shed tight?" he asked.

"Chicken-tight, but not turkey-tight, apparently. Nothing is
turkey-tight."

"They're bigger than chickens."

"Not in any one spot they aren't. They're like coiled wire--when they
stretch out to get through a crack they have _no_ dimensio