If the quaint preacher had urged the rational enjoyment of the Thanksgiving cheer from the pulpit, Mopsey labored with equal zeal at home to have it worthy of enjoyment. At an early hour she had cleared decks, and taken possession of the kitchen: kindling, with dawn, a great fire in the oven for the pies, and another on the hearth for the turkey. But it was from the oven, heaping it to the top with fresh relays of dry wood, that she expected the Thanksgiving angel to walk in all his beauty and majesty. In performance of her duty, and from a sense only that there could be no thanksgiving without a turkey, she planted the tin oven on the hearth, spitted the gobbler, and from time to time, merely as a matter of absolute necessity, gave it a turn; but about the mouth of the great oven she hovered constantly, like a spirit--had her head in and out at the opening every other minute; and, when at last the pies were slided in upon the warm bottom, she lingered there regarding the change they were undergoing with the fond admiration with which a connoisseur in sunsets hangs upon the changing colors of the evening sky. The leisure this double duty allowed her was employed by Mopsey in scaring away the poultry and idle young chickens which rushed in at the back entrance of the kitchen in swarms, and hopped with yellow legs about the floor with the racket of constant falling showers of corn. Upon the half door opening on the front the red rooster had mounted, and with his head on one side observed with a knowing eye all that went forward; showing perhaps most interest in the turning of the spit, the impalement of the turkey thereon having been with him an object of special consideration. The highly colored picture of Warren at Bunker-Hill, writhing in his death-agony on one wall of the kitchen, and General Marion feasting from a potato, in his tent, on the other, did not in the least attract the attention of Mopsey. She saw nothing on the whole horizon of the glowing apartment but the pies and the turkey, and even for the moment neglected to puzzle herself, as she was accustomed to in the pauses of her daily labors, with the wonders and mysteries of an ancient dog-eared spelling-book which lay upon the smoky mantel.