d, for
seldom hath there been such cause and need to keep a Thanksgiving!"

And they all said Amen!

1800 AND FROZE TO DEATH[31]

BY C. A. STEPHENS.

An exciting story of a battle with a crazy moose. It has a
Thanksgiving flavour, too.

"What shall we have for Thanksgiving dinner?" was a question which
distressed more than one household that year. Indeed, it was often a
question what to have for dinner, supper, or breakfast on any day. For
that was the strangely unpropitious, unproductive season of 1816,
quaintly known in local annals as "1800 and Froze to Death."

[Footnote 31: From the _Youth's Companion_, November 26, 1908.]

It was shortly after the close of the War of 1812 with England. Our
country was then poor and but little cultivated. There was no golden
West to send carloads of wheat and corn; no Florida or California to
send fruit; there were no cars, no railroads. What the people of the
Eastern States had they must raise for themselves, and that year there
were no crops.

Nothing grew, nothing ripened properly. Winter lingered even in the
lap of May. As late as the middle of June there was a heavy snowstorm
in New England. Frosts occurred every fortnight of the season. The
seed potatoes, corn, and beans, when planted, either rotted in the
ground or came up to be killed by the frosts. The cold continued
through July and August. A little barley, still less wheat and rye, a
few oats, in favourable situations, were the only cereals harvested,
and these were much pinched in the kernel.

Actual starvation threatened hundreds of farmers' families as this
singular summer and autumn advanced. The corn crop, then the main
staple in the East, was wholly cut off. Two and three dollars a
bushel--equal to ten dollars to-day--were paid for corn that year--by
those who had the money to purchase it. Many of the poorer families
subsisted in part on the boiled sprouts of raspberry and other shrubs.
Starving children stole forth into the fields of the less indigent
farmers by night, and dug up the seed potatoes and sprouted corn to
eat raw.

Moreover, there appeared to be little or no game in the forest; many
roving bears were seen, and wolves were bold. All wild animals,
indeed, behaved abnormally, as if they, too, felt that nature was out
of joint. The eggs of the grouse or partridge failed to hatch; even
woodchucks were lean and scarce. So of the brooding hens at the
settler's barn: the eggs w