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.

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.

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