"

"There won't be a turkey apiece."

"No, eh? Well, that's what I figure on. Half a turkey, anyhow. Got to
be; besides chickens, hams, sausages, and all that kind of fixin's.
You heard what Bill Sylvester's girl wrote from Philamadink-a-daisy-oh?
No, eh? Well, he come in a-purpose to read me the letter. Says there's
going to be three or four hundred thousand turkeys, besides them
fixin's! Sherman's boys can't get any; they're marched too far away,
out of reach. The Shenandoah boys'll get some, and Butler's crowd, and
us chaps, and the blockading squadrons. Bill's girl says so. We'll get
the whole lot between us. Four hundred thousand turkeys! Of course
there'll be a turkey apiece; there's got to be, if there's any sense
in arithmetic. Oh, I'll be choosin' between breast-meat and hind-legs
on Thanksgiving,--you bet your sweet life on that!"

This expectation that there would be a turkey a-piece was not shared
by Company I; but no one denied it in Charley's hearing. The boy held
it as sick people often do fantastic notions, and all fell into the
humor of strengthening the reasoning on which he went.

It was clear that no appetite for turkey moved my poor "buddy," but
that his brain was busy with the "whole-turkey-a-piece" idea as one
significant of the immense liberality of the folks at home, and their
absorbing interest in the army.

"Where's there any nation that ever was that would get to work and fix
up four hundred thousand turkeys for the boys?" he often remarked,
with ecstatic patriotism.

I have often wondered why "Bill Sylvester's girl" gave that
flourishing account of the preparations for our Thanksgiving dinner.
It was only on searching the newspaper files recently that I surmised
her sources of information. Newspapers seldom reached our regiment
until they were several weeks old, and then they were not much read,
at least by me. Now I know how enthusiastic the papers of November,
'64, were on the great feast for the army.

For instance, on the morning of that Thanksgiving day, the 24th of
November, the New York Tribune said editorially:--

"Forty thousand turkeys, eighty thousand turkeys, one
hundred and sixty thousand turkeys, nobody knows how many
turkeys have been sent to our soldiers. Such masses of
breast-meat and such mountains of stuffing; drumsticks
enough to fit out three or four Grand Armies, a perfect
promontory of pope's noses, a mighty aggregate of wings. T