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.

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.

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