All the early travellers in America confirm the vast weight of these wild turkeys--Josselyn said sixty pounds. The turkey has not grown larger by domestication, the wild birds are still finer and more beautiful than the tame ones. All foreign epicures agree that American turkeys are the best in the world. In America we make fine distinctions, even in American turkeys; tastes differ with localities. In some northern States no turkey is perfect unless stuffed with chestnuts--that is, as food. In Louisiana he is gorged with pecan-nuts. In South Carolina raw rice is your only prime turkey-food. In Virginia wild persimmons give the turkey a tang that gilds refined gold. The President of the United States, whoever he may be, feasts every Thanksgiving Day on a Narragansett turkey fattened on Narragansett grasshoppers--and I approve the President’s taste. These Presidential turkeys, though great and fat, are not “as bigg as ostridges;” but a Narragansett turkey with whom I was acquainted--as Rosa Bonheur would say--fairly rivalled his ancestors of colonial days. His name was Launcelot Gobbo; he was born, or rather hatched, on a Narragansett farm. He was the joint property of Bill and Ralph Prime, two farmer’s sons, fourteen and fifteen years of age, who, according to the good old fashion in the Prime family, were given each year some portion of the farm stock--a cosset lamb, a brood of chickens, a pig, a cote of pigeons--to rear and sell, or keep as their very own. This year their share of the farm-products was Launcelot Gobbo and his mate. His name was given him by the village school-teacher, a young college student who chanced to come frequently to call on the boy’s sister, Mary Prime. Gobbo was chosen as their handsel because he was such a mammoth turkey-chick, a nine-days’-old wonder; and by tender cherishing he had fulfilled the great promise of his youth. This great size had been aided by careful feeding, on a composite diet, of Narragansett fashion, extended by Oriental suggestion. His first food was such as all well-reared Narragansett turkeys have, milk curdled with rennet, by which the gasps and stomach-ache so fatal to turkey infancy were avoided. Then came the natural food-supply of grasshoppers and Rhode Island whole corn. The Prime boys had few books to read; among them were several dry and colorless memoirs of sainted missionaries to the East. There was one nutritious kernel, however, in one of these rustling husks of books; it was an account of the preparation of locusts as food, the roasting, frying, and drying them for grinding them into meal. Bill Prime was an inventive genius, a true Yankee, ever ready to take a hint; moreover, he was animated by sincere affection for his pet, and pride in his size; and as he read the meagre missionary accounts he conceived the notion of supplying Gobbo with his dearly loved grasshoppers after autumnal winds had chilled and cleared the fields of vegetable and insect life.