Mrs. Fletcher took him down town the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Already the holiday throngs were beginning to fill the noisy, grimy streets and passage, in them was both tedious and difficult for a small boy. Weary after the morning of tramping from store to store, they were returning to the railroad station when a display in a furniture store window caught his eye. Rich plush hangings and an occasional picture gave the impression of the walls of a room. In the center, a shiny mahogany bed stood, with a dresser of like material and fragile, spindle-legged chairs grouped around it. He tugged at his mother's hand to stop a moment. She obeyed indulgently, as his eyes became glued to the little sign in the foreground. "Bedroom set. Adam style. Reduced to _three hundred and sixty-five dollars_." He gasped. Three hundred and sixty-five dollars for a bed and a dresser and chairs which would break the first time a small boy plumped down on them! Then came the appalling thought: _"How far would a thousand dollars last with such prices?"_ All the speeding ride homeward, and after supper as he stretched out on the bed before undressing, he worried over this new and unexpected problem. If bedroom furniture _alone_ cost that much and the pictures and carpet were still to be paid for, the total would at least be four hundred and fifty dollars. The parlor should cost even more, for chairs, a sofa, and a reading table were to be placed in it. As for the dining-room, he shrank from a consideration of that expense! And there were dishes and books and silverware! Two thousand dollars was the least he could expect his five furnished rooms to cost, and he had considered half that amount sufficient for all expenses. Newly married folks usually took honeymoon trips, too. He groaned. Would he ever earn enough to marry Louise? Thanksgiving drew nearer. At school, on the Wednesday immediately preceding, the chosen few who were Miss Brown's personal aides, stayed after school at noon to decorate the room for the entertainment to be given at a quarter of two. Her desk was backed against the wall, and the cornstalks used by the drawing class as models for their efforts, were grouped against it to form a background for the impassioned actors. A supply of pumpkins, gourds, and other autumnal fruits of the earth, borrowed by the teacher from the grocer with whom her mother traded, gave still greater festivity to the room. There was no need of roll call. Every child was there, for they were too much interested to absent themselves. Miss Brown gave a brief history of the origin of the day. A little girl whose pink dress clashed violently with her red hair and freckled complexion, followed with a rendition of a doleful poem beginning: Only a grain of corn, Moth_ur_, Only a grain of corn. Then the class sang one of the songs in the fourth-grade music book and settled back expectantly, for the feature piece of the afternoon.