It was not as easy a task to catch and dry these American grasshoppers as Oriental locusts, but love laughs at limitations; just as Gobbo laughed when his daily dole of grasshoppers was dealt out to him on chill October and November mornings, with the Tallman sweetings that formed his dessert. “Laugh and grow fat” is the old saying; and as Gobbo laughed he also grew fat, and he waxed taller and taller. Ralph thought Gobbo weighed thirty pounds; Bill set the weight at least five pounds higher. As the turkey was full and rich of feather he looked to me twice as large as any other I had ever seen; really big enough to reach the seventeenth-century standard of “three score pound in weight.” But Gobbo had other claims to consideration besides his size or his distinguished name; he was an accomplished turkey--a trick-performer. Like Shakespeare’s famous Gobbo for whom he was named, he “used his heels at his master’s commands.” When Bill struck the ground near him with a stick and called out “Dance, Gobbo, dance for the ladies,” and set up a shrill fife-like whistle, Gobbo spread his great fan-like tail, and nodded and bowed his head, and circled and hopped around in exact time with the rapping of the stick, in the most pompous, ridiculous, mirth-provoking caricature of a dance that ever was footed or clawed. He posed before the whole town as a show-bird. Stolid Narragansett farmers and fishermen for miles around came to see him, and roared aloud at his dancing, which he had to exhibit every day in the week. Even on Sunday, at the nooning, Bill proudly but secretly led the neighbors’ boys home to the farm and behind the barn; though the deacon sternly frowned on a Sunday dance, even by a turkey who had no soul to be saved. It was the second week of November; Gobbo was still growing and still dancing, when one day a gayly painted vehicle with a smart horse came dashing into town. The wagon had an enclosed box behind the chaise front. It might be taken for a peddler’s cart or a patent-medicine coach, but it was neither; it was the collecting-van of a Boston “antique-man.” Persuasive, smiling, flattering, peering into every kitchen, cupboard, and dresser, in every parlor closet, in every bedroom and gabled attic, he gathered in his lucrative autumnal harvest of brass andirons and candlesticks, of old blue dishes and copper lustre pitchers, of harp-back chairs and spinning-wheels. He débonnairly purchased two pewter porringers, a sampler, and an old mirror of Mrs. Prime, while he effusively praised the farm and the cattle. And as he partook of the apples and cider generously set before him, he shouted with laughter at Gobbo, who proudly danced for him again and again. As the early twilight began to lower, the “antique-man” called out a cheerful good-night and drove away. Gobbo also stalked off--and forever--from the Prime door-yard, for in the morning he had vanished from the farm as completely as if he had evaporated.