Thanksgiving Day, my boy, is an able-bodied national festival which has dwelt unctuously in all my less spiritual annual reminiscences, since that poetical and beautiful time of life when the touching innocence of childhood tempted me to surreptitiously pick a chicken-leg while my good grandfather was asking a blessing; and to receive therefor that wholesome box of the ears, which not unfrequently imparts a temporary and excessive warmth to the brain of virtuous boyhood. 'Tis sweet to remember that old-fashioned Thanksgiving Eve, my boy, when the venerable and widowed Mrs. McShane, our cook, would renew her annual custom of inveigling us children into the kitchen on pretence of admiring our new shoes; and then proceed, by divers artful and melancholy phrases, to darken our little souls with a heart-sickening conviction of her utter failure to procure, in her recent trip to market, that long-anticipated Turkey! 'Tis pleasant to recollect how entirely we were cast down thereat, and how rigidly we refrained from so much as a single glance toward the old "Dresser," whereon stood the well-known market-basket of Mrs. McShane, with the plump legs of the choicest of gobblers protruding very obviously therefrom! 'Tis joyous to recall how we stared mercilessly at every possible thing in the kitchen except that "Dresser;" and how desolately we received certain sadly-philosophical remarks from Mrs. McShane, as to the unspeakable admiration assuredly merited by those "rale good childers," who could, for one Thanksgiving Day, endure starvation without tears. The little deception was most tenderly and kindly meant, my boy; it was the artless roguery of a dear old heart--the gentlest of cheats--the fondest of frauds; and the very remembrance of it, at this remote moment, not only fills my manly bosom with the softest charity, but endows me with a nicer mental perception of actual good in seeming wickedness, than any yet disclosed by my more obtuse fellow-countrymen.