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<h2> VIII. THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING </h2>
<p>One of the best things in farming is gathering the chestnuts,
hickory-nuts, butternuts, and even beechnuts, in the late fall, after the
frosts have cracked the husks and the high winds have shaken them, and the
colored leaves have strewn the ground. On a bright October day, when the
air is full of golden sunshine, there is nothing quite so exhilarating as
going nutting. Nor is the pleasure of it altogether destroyed for the boy
by the consideration that he is making himself useful in obtaining
supplies for the winter household. The getting-in of potatoes and corn is
a different thing; that is the prose, but nutting is the poetry, of farm
life. I am not sure but the boy would find it very irksome, though, if he
were obliged to work at nut-gathering in order to procure food for the
family. He is willing to make himself useful in his own way. The Italian
boy, who works day after day at a huge pile of pine-cones, pounding and
cracking them and taking out the long seeds, which are sold and eaten as
we eat nuts (and which are almost as good as pumpkin-seeds, another
favorite with the Italians), probably does not see the fun of nutting.
Indeed, if the farmer-boy here were set at pounding off the walnut-shucks
and opening the prickly chestnut-burs as a task, he would think himself an
ill-used boy. What a hardship the prickles in his fingers would be! But
now he digs them out with his jack-knife, and enjoys the process, on the
whole. The boy is willing to do any amount of work if it is called play.</p>
<p>In nutting, the squirrel is not more nimble and industrious than the boy.
I like to see a crowd of boys swarm over a chestnut-grove; they leave a
desert behind them like the seventeen-year locusts. To climb a tree and
shake it, to club it, to strip it of its fruit, and pass to the next, is
the sport of a brief time. I have seen a legion of boys scamper over our
grass-plot under the chestnut-trees, each one as active as if he were a
new patent picking-machine, sweeping the ground clean of nuts, and
disappear over the hill before I could go to the door and speak to them
about it. Indeed, I have noticed that boys don't care much for
conversation with the owners of fruit-trees. They could speedily make
their fortunes if they would work as rapidly in cotton-fields. I have
never seen anything like it, except a flock of turkeys removing the
grasshoppers from a piece of pasture.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is not generally known that we get the idea of some of our best
military maneuvers from the turkey. The deploying of the skirmish-line in
advance of an army is one of them. The drum-major of our holiday militia
companies is copied exactly from the turkey gobbler; he has the same
splendid appearance, the same proud step, and the same martial aspect. The
gobbler does not lead his forces in the field, but goes behind them, like
the colonel of a regiment, so that he can see every part of the line and
direct its movements. This resemblance is one of the most singular things
in natural history. I like to watch the gobbler maneuvering his forces in
a grasshopper-field. He throws out his company of two dozen turkeys in a
crescent-shaped skirmish-line, the number disposed at equal distances,
while he walks majestically in the rear. They advance rapidly, picking
right and left, with military precision, killing the foe and disposing of
the dead bodies with the same peck. Nobody has yet discovered how many
grasshoppers a turkey will hold; but he is very much like a boy at a
Thanksgiving dinner,—he keeps on eating as long as the supplies
last. The gobbler, in one of these raids, does not condescend to grab a
single grasshopper,—at least, not while anybody is watching him. But
I suppose he makes up for it when his dignity cannot be injured by having
spectators of his voracity; perhaps he falls upon the grasshoppers when
they are driven into a corner of the field. But he is only fattening
himself for destruction; like all greedy persons, he comes to a bad end.
And if the turkeys had any Sunday-school, they would be taught this.</p>
<p>The New England boy used to look forward to Thanksgiving as the great
event of the year. He was apt to get stents set him,—so much corn to
husk, for instance, before that day, so that he could have an extra
play-spell; and in order to gain a day or two, he would work at his task
with the rapidity of half a dozen boys. He always had the day after
Thanksgiving as a holiday, and this was the day he counted on.
Thanksgiving itself was rather an awful festival,—very much like
Sunday, except for the enormous dinner, which filled his imagination for
months before as completely as it did his stomach for that day and a week
after. There was an impression in the house that that dinner was the most
important event since the landing from the Mayflower. Heliogabalus, who
did not resemble a Pilgrim Father at all, but who had prepared for himself
in his day some very sumptuous banquets in Rome, and ate a great deal of
the best he could get (and liked peacocks stuffed with asafetida, for one
thing), never had anything like a Thanksgiving dinner; for do you suppose
that he, or Sardanapalus either, ever had twenty-four different kinds of
pie at one dinner? Therein many a New England boy is greater than the
Roman emperor or the Assyrian king, and these were among the most
luxurious eaters of their day and generation. But something more is
necessary to make good men than plenty to eat, as Heliogabalus no doubt
found when his head was cut off. Cutting off the head was a mode the
people had of expressing disapproval of their conspicuous men. Nowadays
they elect them to a higher office, or give them a mission to some foreign
country, if they do not do well where they are.</p>
<p>For days and days before Thanksgiving the boy was kept at work evenings,
pounding and paring and cutting up and mixing (not being allowed to taste
much), until the world seemed to him to be made of fragrant spices, green
fruit, raisins, and pastry,—a world that he was only yet allowed to
enjoy through his nose. How filled the house was with the most delicious
smells! The mince-pies that were made! If John had been shut in solid
walls with them piled about him, he could n't have eaten his way out in
four weeks. There were dainties enough cooked in those two weeks to have
made the entire year luscious with good living, if they had been scattered
along in it. But people were probably all the better for scrimping
themselves a little in order to make this a great feast. And it was not by
any means over in a day. There were weeks deep of chicken-pie and other
pastry. The cold buttery was a cave of Aladdin, and it took a long time to
excavate all its riches.</p>
<p>Thanksgiving Day itself was a heavy dav, the hilarity of it being so
subdued by going to meeting, and the universal wearing of the Sunday
clothes, that the boy could n't see it. But if he felt little
exhilaration, he ate a great deal. The next day was the real holiday. Then
were the merry-making parties, and perhaps the skatings and sleigh-rides,
for the freezing weather came before the governor's proclamation in many
parts of New England. The night after Thanksgiving occurred, perhaps, the
first real party that the boy had ever attended, with live girls in it,
dressed so bewitchingly. And there he heard those philandering songs, and
played those sweet games of forfeits, which put him quite beside himself,
and kept him awake that night till the rooster crowed at the end of his
first chicken-nap. What a new world did that party open to him! I think it
likely that he saw there, and probably did not dare say ten words to, some
tall, graceful girl, much older than himself, who seemed to him like a new
order of being. He could see her face just as plainly in the darkness of
his chamber. He wondered if she noticed how awkward he was, and how short
his trousers-legs were. He blushed as he thought of his rather ill-fitting
shoes; and determined, then and there, that he wouldn't be put off with a
ribbon any longer, but would have a young man's necktie. It was somewhat
painful, thinking the party over, but it was delicious, too. He did not
think, probably, that he would die for that tall, handsome girl; he did
not put it exactly in that way. But he rather resolved to live for her,
which might in the end amount to the same thing. At least, he thought that
nobody would live to speak twice disrespectfully of her in his presence.</p>
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