Christmas Every Day | Page 6

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.
[Illustration: "THE OLD GOBBLER 'FIRST PREMIUM' SAID THEY WERE GOING TO TURN THE TABLES NOW."]
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 other little girl was awfully frightened to have the hen-turkey take that tack.
"I should think she would 'a' been," said the little girl; and she cuddled snugger into her papa's arms. "What could she say? Ugh! Go on."
Well, she didn't know what to say, that's a fact. You see, she never thought of it in that light before. All she