a great many times, Sam," she continued, in tones of severe
admonition. "Hepsey is a hard-working woman, but she can't be expected
to see to everything, and you oughter 'ave been at home that night to
fasten up your own barn and look after your own creeturs."

Sam took the rebuke all the more meekly as he perceived the stiff
black legs of a turkey poking out from under my grandmother's apron
while she was delivering it. To be exhorted and told of his
shortcomings, and then furnished with a turkey at Thanksgiving, was a
yearly part of his family program. In time he departed, not only with
the turkey, but with us boys in procession after him, bearing a mince
and a pumpkin pie for Hepsey's children.

"Poor things!" my grandmother remarked; "they ought to have something
good to eat Thanksgiving Day; 'tain't their fault that they've got a
shiftless father."

Sam, in his turn, moralized to us children, as we walked beside him:
"A body'd think that Hepsey'd learn to trust in Providence," he said,
"but she don't. She allers has a Thanksgiving dinner pervided; but
that 'ere woman ain't grateful for it, by no manner o' means. Now
she'll be jest as cross as she can be, 'cause this 'ere ain't _our_
turkey, and these 'ere ain't our pies. Folks doos lose so much that
hes sech dispositions."

A multitude of similar dispensations during the course of the week
materially reduced the great pile of chickens and turkeys which black
Caesar's efforts in slaughtering, picking, and dressing kept daily
supplied....

* * * * *

Great as the preparations were for the dinner, everything was so
contrived that not a soul in the house should be kept from the
morning service of Thanksgiving in the church, and from listening to
the Thanksgiving sermon, in which the minister was expected to express
his views freely concerning the politics of the country and the state
of things in society generally, in a somewhat more secular vein of
thought than was deemed exactly appropriate to the Lord's day. But it
is to be confessed that, when the good man got carried away by the
enthusiasm of his subject to extend these exercises beyond a certain
length, anxious glances, exchanged between good wives, sometimes
indicated a weakness of the flesh, having a tender reference to the
turkeys and chickens and chicken pies which might possibly be
overdoing in the ovens at home. But your old brick oven was a true
Puritan institution,