* * *
"'What have you got there, boys? Jack-o'-lantern? Well, well. That's a good one!'
* * *
"He came up and looked at the pumpkin-glory, and he bent back and he bent forward, and he doubled down and he straightened up, and laughed till the boys thought he was going to kill himself.
* * *
"They had all intended to burst into an Indian yell, and dance round the pumpkin-glory; but the funniest papa said, 'Now all you fellows keep still half a minute,' and the next thing they knew he ran into the house, and came out, walking his wife before him with both his hands over her eyes. Then the boys saw he was going to have some fun with her, and they kept as still as mice, and waited till he walked her up to the pumpkin-glory; and she was saying all the time, 'Now, John, if this is some of your fooling, I'll give it to you.' When he got her close up he took away his hands, and she gave a kind of a whoop, and then she began to laugh, the pumpkin-glory was so funny, and to chase the funniest papa all round the yard to box his ears, and as soon as she had boxed them she said, 'Now let's go in and send the rest out,' and in about a quarter of a second all the other papas came out, holding their hands over the other mothers' eyes till they got them up to the pumpkin-glory; and then there was such a yelling and laughing and chasing and ear-boxing that you never heard anything like it; and all at once the funniest papa hallooed out: 'Where's gramma? Gramma's got to see it! Grandma'll enjoy it. It's just gramma's kind of joke,' and then the mothers all got round him and said he shouldn't fool the grandmother, anyway; and he said he wasn't going to: he was just going to bring her out and let her see it; and his wife went along with him to watch that he didn't begin acting up.
* * *
"The grandmother had been sitting all alone in her room ever since dinner; because she was always afraid somehow that if you enjoyed yourself it was a sign you were going to suffer for it, and she had enjoyed herself a good deal that day, and she was feeling awfully about it. When the funniest papa and his wife came in she said, 'What is it? What is it? Is the world a-burnin' up? Well, you got to wrap up warm, then, or you'll ketch your death o' cold runnin' and then stoppin' to rest with your pores all open!'
* * *
"The funniest papa's wife she went up and kissed her, and said, 'No, grandmother, the world's all right,' and then she told her just how it was, and how they wanted her to come out and see the jack-o'-lantern, just to please the children; and she must come, anyway; because it was the funniest jack-o'-lantern there ever was, and then she told how the funniest papa had fooled her, and then how they had got the other papas to fool the other mothers, and they had all had the greatest fun then you ever saw. All the time she kept putting on her things for her, and the grandmother seemed to get quite in the notion, and she laughed a little, and they thought she was going to enjoy it as much as anybody; they really did, because they were all very tender of her, and they wouldn't have scared her for anything, and everybody kept cheering her up and telling her how much they knew she would like it, till they got her to the pump. The little pumpkin-glory was feeling awfully proud and self-satisfied; for it had never seen any flower or any vegetable treated with half so much honor by human beings. It wasn't sure at first that it was very nice to be laughed at so much, but after a while it began to conclude that the papas and the mammas were just laughing at the joke of the whole thing. When the old grandmother got up close, it thought it would do something extra to please her; or else the heat of the candle had dried it up so that it cracked without intending to. Anyway, it tried to give a very broad grin, and all of a sudden it split its mouth from ear to ear."
* * *
"You didn't say it had any ears before," said the boy.
* * *
"No; it had them behind," said the papa; and the boy felt like giving him just one pound; but he thought it might stop the story, and so he let the papa go on.
* * *
"As soon as the grandmother saw it open its mouth that way she just gave one scream, 'My sakes! It's comin' to life!' And she threw up her arms, and she threw up her feet, and if the funniest papa hadn't been there to catch her, and if there hadn't been forty or fifty other sons and daughters, and grandsons and daughters, and great-grandsons and great-granddaughters, very likely she might have fallen. As it was, they piled round her, and kept her up; but there were so many of them they jostled the pump, and the first thing the pumpkin-glory knew, it fell down and burst open; and the pig that the boys had plagued, and that had kept squealing all the time because it thought that the people had come out to feed it, knocked the loose board off its pen, and flew out and gobbled the pumpkin-glory up, candle and all, and that was the end of the proud little pumpkin-glory."
* * *
"And when the pig ate the candle it looked like the magician when he puts burning tow in his mouth," said the boy.
* * *
"Exactly," said the papa.
* * *
The children were both silent for a moment. Then the boy said, "This story never had any moral, I believe, papa?"
* * *
"Not a bit," said the papa. "Unless," he added, "the moral was that you had better not be ambitious, unless you want to come to the sad end of this proud little pumpkin-glory."
* * *
"Why, but the good little pumpkin was eaten up, too," said the boy.
* * *
"That's true," the papa acknowledged.
* * *
"Well," said the little girl, "there's a great deal of difference between being eaten by persons and eaten by pigs."
* * *
"All the difference in the world," said the papa; and he laughed, and ran out of the library before the boy could get at him.
Turkeys Turning The Tables
William Dean Howells
Turkeys Turning The Tables
"Well, you see," the papa began, on Christmas morning, when the little girl had snuggled in his lap into just the right shape for listening, "it was the night after Thanksgiving, and you know how everybody feels the night after Thanksgiving."
* * *
"Yes; but you needn't begin that way, papa," said the little girl; "I'm not going to have any moral to it this time."
* * *
"No, indeed! But it can be a true story, can't it?"
* * *
"I don't know," said the little girl; "I like made-up ones."
* * *
"Well, this is going to be a true one, anyway, and it's no use talking."
* * *
All the relations in the neighborhood had come to dinner, and then gone back to their own houses, but some of the relations had come from a distance, and these had to stay all night at the grandfather's. But whether they went or whether they stayed, they all told the grandmother that they did believe it was the best Thanksgiving dinner they had ever eaten in their born days. They had had cranberry sauce, and they'd had mashed potato, and they'd had mince-pie and pandowdy, and they'd had celery, and they'd had Hubbard squash, and they'd had tea and coffee both, and they'd had apple-dumpling with hard sauce, and they'd had hot biscuit and sweet pickle, and mangoes, and frosted cake, and nuts, and cauliflower--
* * *
"Don't mix them all up so!" pleaded the little girl. "It's perfectly confusing. I can't hardly tell what they had now."
* * *
"Well, they mixed them up just in the same way, and I suppose that's one of the reasons why it happened."
* * *
Whenever a child wanted to go back from dumpling and frosted cake to mashed potato and Hubbard squash--they were old-fashioned kind of people, and they had everything on the table at once, because the grandmother and the aunties cooked it, and they couldn't keep jumping up all the time to change the plates--and its mother said it shouldn't, its grandmother said, Indeed it should, then, and helped it herself; and the child's father would say, Well, he guessed he would go back, too, for a change; and the child's mother would say, She should think he would be
ashamed; and then they would get to going back, till everything was perfectly higgledy-piggledy.
* * *
"Oh, shouldn't you like to have been there, papa?" sighed the little girl.
* * *
"You mustn't interrupt. Where was I?"
* * *
"Higgledy-piggledy."
* * *
"Oh yes!"
* * *
Well, but the greatest thing of all was the turkey that they had. It was a gobbler, I tell you, that was nearly as big as a giraffe.
* * *
"Papa!"
* * *
It took the premium at the county fair, and when it was dressed it weighed fifteen pounds--well, maybe twenty--and it was so heavy that the grandmothers and the aunties couldn't put it on the table, and they had to get one of the papas to do it. You ought to have heard the hurrahing when the children saw him coming in from the kitchen with it. It seemed as if they couldn't hardly talk of anything but that turkey the whole dinner-time.
* * *
The grandfather hated to carve, and so one of the papas did it; and whenever he gave anybody a piece, the grandfather would tell some new story about the turkey, till pretty soon the aunties got to saying, "Now, father, stop!" and one of them said it made it seem as if the gobbler was walking about on the table, to hear so much about him, and it took her appetite all away; and that made the papas begin to ask the grandfather more and more about the turkey.
* * *
"Yes," said the little girl, thoughtfully; "I know what papas are."
* * *
"Yes, they're pretty much all alike."
* * *
And the mammas began to say they acted like a lot of silly boys; and what would the children think? But nothing could stop it; and all through the afternoon and evening, whenever the papas saw any of the aunties or mammas round, they would begin to ask the grandfather more particulars about the turkey. The grandfather was pretty forgetful, and he told the same things right over. Well, and so it went on till it came bedtime, and then the mammas and aunties began to laugh and whisper together, and to say they did believe they should dream about that turkey; and when the papas kissed the grandmother good-night, they said, Well, they must have his mate for Christmas; and then they put their arms round the mammas and went out haw-hawing.
* * *
"I don't think they behaved very dignified," said the little girl.
* * *
"Well, you see, they were just funning, and had got going, and it was Thanksgiving, anyway."
* * *
Well, in about half an hour everybody was fast asleep and dreaming--
* * *
"Is it going to be a dream?" asked the little girl, with some reluctance.
* * *
"Didn't I say it was going to be a true story?"
* * *
"Yes."
* * *
"How can it be a dream, then?"
* * *
"You said everybody was fast asleep and dreaming."
* * *
"Well, but I hadn't got through. Everybody except one little girl."
* * *
"Now, papa!"
* * *
"What?"
* * *
"Don't you go and say her name was the same as mine, and her eyes the same color."
* * *
"What an idea!"
* * *
This was a very good little girl, and very respectful to her papa, and didn't suspect him of tricks, but just believed everything he said. And she was a very pretty little girl, and had red eyes, and blue cheeks, and straight hair, and a curly nose--
* * *
"Now, papa, if you get to cutting up--"
* * *
"Well, I won't, then!"
* * *
Well, she was rather a delicate little girl, and whenever she over-ate, or anything,
* * *
"Have bad dreams! Aha! I told you it was going to be a dream."
* * *
"You wait till I get through."
* * *
She was apt to lie awake thinking, and some of her thinks were pretty dismal. Well, that night, instead of thinking and tossing and turning, and counting a thousand, it seemed to this other little girl that she began to see things as soon as she had got warm in bed, and before, even. And the first thing she saw was a large, bronze-colored--
* * *
"Turkey gobbler!"
* * *
"No, ma'am. Turkey gobbler's ghost."
* * *
"Foo!" said the little girl, rather uneasily; "whoever heard of a turkey's ghost, I should like to know?"
* * *
"Never mind, that," said the papa. "If it hadn't been a ghost, could the moonlight have shone through it? No, indeed! The stuffing wouldn't have let it. So you see it must have been a ghost."
* * *
It had a red pasteboard placard round its neck, with FIRST PREMIUM printed on it, and so she knew that it was the ghost of the very turkey they had had for dinner. It was perfectly awful when it put up its tail, and dropped its wings, and strutted just the way the grandfather said it used to do. It seemed to be in a wide pasture, like that back of the house, and the children had to cross it to get home, and they were all afraid of the turkey that kept gobbling at them and threatening them, because they had eaten him up. At last one of the boys--it was the other little girl's brother--said he would run across and get his papa to come out and help them, and the first thing she knew the turkey was after him, gaining, gaining, gaining, and all the grass was full of hen-turkeys and turkey chicks, running after him, and gaining, gaining, gaining, and just as he was getting to the wall he tripped and fell over a turkey-pen, and all at once she was in one of the aunties' room, and the aunty was in bed, and the turkeys were walking up and down over her, and stretching out their wings, and blaming her. Two of them carried a platter of chicken pie, and there was a large pumpkin jack-o'-lantern hanging to the bedpost to light the room, and it looked just like the other little girl's brother in the face, only perfectly ridiculous.
* * *
Then the old gobbler, First Premium, clapped his wings, and said, "Come on, chick-chickledren!" and then they all seemed to be in her room, and she was standing in the middle of it in her night-gown, and tied round and round with ribbons, so she couldn't move hand or foot. The old gobbler, First Premium, said they were going to turn the tables now, and she knew what he meant, for they had had that in the reader at school just before vacation, and the teacher had explained it. He made a long speech, with his hat on, and kept pointing at her with one of his wings, while he told the other turkeys that it was her grandfather who had done it, and now it was their turn. He said that human beings had been eating turkeys ever since the discovery of America, and it was time for the turkeys to begin paying them back, if they were ever going to. He said she was pretty young, but she was as big as he was, and he had no doubt they would enjoy her.
* * *
The other little girl tried to tell him that she was not to blame, and that she only took a very, very little piece.
* * *
"But it was right off the breast," said the gobbler, and he shed tears, so that the other little girl cried, too. She didn't have much hopes, they all seemed so spiteful, especially the little turkey chicks; but she told them that she was very tender-hearted, and never hurt a single thing, and she tried to make them understand that there was a great difference between eating people and just eating turkeys.
* * *
"What difference, I should like to know?" says the old hen-turkey, pretty snappishly.
* * *
"People have got souls, and turkeys haven't," says the other little girl.
* * *
"I don't see how that makes it any better," says the old hen-turkey. "It don't make it any better for the turkeys. If we haven't got any souls, we can't live after we've been eaten up, and you can."
The Big Book of Christmas Page 386