Standish alone suspected this _arriere pensee_, and when Bradford mildly applauded the generous kindness of their guests, he answered with a chuckle,-- "Ay, as kind as the traveler who begs the highwayman to let him go home and fetch a larger treasure." But in spite of his doubts the prince intended and made a _bona fide_ hunt, and returned early in the next day with as much venison as lasted the entire company four days. "Oh, if I had but some Spanish chestnuts to stuff these turkeys, they might seem more like their brethren across the seas," exclaimed Priscilla as she turned over a pile of the wild birds and chose those to be first cooked. "Nay, but to me the flavor is better, and the meat more succulent of these than of any I ever saw at home," replied John Alden. "And the size! Do but look at this fellow, he will scale well-nigh twenty pound if an ounce." "If 't were a goose I would name it John, 't would be so prodigious a goose," replied Priscilla with a glance so saucy and so bewitching that her adorer forgot to reply, and she went briskly on,-- "Come now, young man, there's much to do and scant time to talk of it. Call me some of those gaping boys yonder and let them pluck these fowl, and bid John Billington come and break up these deer. And I must have wood and water galore to make meat for a hundred men. Stir thyself!" "I was thinking, Priscilla--why not stuff the turkeys with beechnuts? There is store of them up at our cottage." "How came they there? Doth our doughty Captain go birds-nesting and nutting in his by-times?" "Nay, but I did, that is, I gathered the nuts for thee, and then--then feared if I offered them thou 'dst only flout me"-- "Oh, sure never was a poor maid so bestead with blind men--well, fetch thy beechnuts." "Nay, Priscilla, but blind, blind? How then am I blind, maiden, say?" "Why, not to have discovered ere this how I dote upon beechnuts. There, get thee gone for them." The dressing of beechnuts proved a rare success, but the preparation proved so long a process that only the delicate young bird made ready for the table where Mistress Brewster presided was thus honored, although in after times Priscilla often made what she called goose-dressing; and when a few years later some sweet potatoes were brought to Plymouth from the Carolinas, she at once adopted them for the same purpose. And so the festival went on for its appointed length of three days, and perhaps the hearty fellowship and good will manifested by the white men toward their guests, and their determination to meet them on the ground of common interests and sympathies, went quite as far as their evident superiority in arms and resources toward establishing the deep-founded and highly valued peace, without which the handful of white men could never have made good their footing upon that stern and sterile coast.