Original in GoOD HOUSEKEeping.

A REAL THANKSGIVING.

WITH A GENUINE NEW ENGLAND FLAVOR.

HERE was no lack of any material element of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner, it seemed to Alice Hathaway, as she went leisurely along the half-mile of country road that lay between the little district school-house and the "old West place." It was November - a mild, sunny day. The soft air was redolent of orchard fruits; the almost leafless tree's on either hand gave freer play to the sunbeams slanting from the westward, and the soft, cloudless sky was tender with Indian summer serenity. The ungathered pumpkins, in yellow rotundity, lay among the withering vines. Here and there some dilatory farmer, the indispensable small boy at his side to "pick up," was digging potatoes. She could see the heaps of uncomely tubers, the fine, brown, moist earth yet clinging to them.

A flock of noisy turkeys was ranging across the meadow, and from afar an echoing "Gobble-gobble-gobble!" betrayed the leader of the straying brood. A butcher's wagon rattled by, heavily laden and bound for the little city on the east. The form of a huge "porker," ready-dressed for market, was conspicuous within. One farmer was unloading barrels of apples at his cellar roll-way. Another opposite, evidently going townward, had in the back of his wagon a basket of crimson cranberries, probably picked from his own tiny swamp, a crook-necked squash, and a basket of mellow pears, beside his firkin of butter and box of eggs. And all along the traveled road that led up the gradual ascent of the high, wind-swept, grove-crowned West Hill, our school mistress knew there were, doubtless, on every hand like cheery sights and sounds, making one feel as if November herself were coöperating in the pleasant preparations for our New England feast.

"But I wonder," thought the teacher, "how many of these people keep Thanksgiving with real, heartfelt and generous cheer! Not all of them, of course. Some are not able, and some have fresh sorrows, and some are alone, or well-nigh so; and some do not feel it, nor care. But there would seem to be enough for all, if the right ones would or could distribute it; and, in such a neighborhood as this, some of the happier homes ought to draw in the lonely people, or the lonely folk themselves could get together-some of them for very sociability."

She had reached the dwelling now that was home to her. It was a long, low house, with many-paned windows, in which, wherever the shutters were undrawn, the warm, westerly sunshine twinkled brightly. No other house around was quite so old-fashioned, outside or inside. An ancient well-sweep, still in use, was in the grassy yard. The narrow stone steps that led to the green-blinded front door were moss grown and uneven, and, as was her wont, she followed the little path, that showed more frequent feet, to the side door, where one worn, sunken stone had been trodden and re-trodden by other generations, and by how many, many, who should cross it no more! The wide, low kitchen was clean and warm and cheerful, as it had need to be, for it was dining-room and sitting-room as well. There was but a small household now to use it in the olden fashion as living-room, and of these only one was of the original family it had sheltered. "Mis' Ethan West," the country folk called her. She was nearly eighty, thin and bent, with tremulous hands and failing strength, yet of quick hearing, with keen and not unkindly eyes, and still of

not inactive habits. Saddened with loneliness and bereavement and age, it was well, perhaps, she retained still good judgment and interest in affairs sufficiently to have the oversight of her farm and such portion of her estate as lay on West Hill. Even care was better than constant and inconsolable brooding over sorrow; yet the money the thin, withered hand must unclose from so soon, at best, was rather a burden than a boon to her.

She sat in her creaking, crooked, straight-backed rocker in the chimney corner, her knitting-sheath fastened to her spare waist, and her work lying idly in her lap, with her hands crossed upon it. She had been listening while Miss Hait read from the weekly papers brought that day from the office. Miss Hait, a distant connection of the Wests, was a woman of middle age, alone in the world, and glad these many years to live at the West homestead as housekeeper and helper, companion and comforter, to the aged woman who so needed her. "Aunt Hetty," as Alice and many who had not Alice's scanty claim to the title called her, had bright, dark eyes and quiet, winning ways, with much native force behind them. A very "capable" woman, in New England parlance, she was intelligent and well-informed beyond most women in New England farm-houses, and it was her unselfish interest in life around her, and her willing services to others, and her appreciative outlook upon the larger world outside her little sphere, and a devout and believing heart most of all, that made her young, rather than prematurely old and querulous. Every one respected, many loved, Hetty Hait, or, as her acquaintances called her, "Miss Mehitable." It was their weekly religious paper she had been reading from, and as she laid it aside, and turned with quick step to prepare the early tea, some good thought she had welcomed deepened in the sunny eyes, and threw the firm mouth into gentler lines. The aged eyes, too, were misty, and the grandniece--for such Alice was-took her own low chair at the high western window in silence.

A child's voice broke the silence, as eager little feet came tripping in to do an errand to Aunt Hetty.

"Mother wants to know, Aunt Hetty," the little girl said, eagerly, "if you will please save her one of your smallest turkeys for Thanksgiving, and if 'twould come any cheaper if she should take it now, and kill it and dress it herself? She'd rather do that way, if it would. We're going to have a real Thanksgiving at our house this year. Brother Ed is coming-and Sue, if she can-and Uncle Joe sent mother five dollars last week; and we're all well, and we'll be all together that is, all but father and little Charley; they died, you know!"-the eager voice went on, dropping here into sadder softness. "And so we mean to have a turkey, if we can, and maybe cranberries and mince pie. Oh! a real Thanksgiving, you know!"

Aunt Hetty was smiling, though perhaps a little tearfully, as she said:

"Why, yes, Mamie; I guess we'll save you one of the young turkeys-won't we, Aunt Charity?"

"I don't know why not," said Mrs. West.

"But will you let us dress it, and will it come any cheaper?" persisted the child. "We don't have much money, you know; and we could pick it, and pin-feather it, too. I can help pull out turkey-feathers!"

Miss Mehitable looked inquiringly and appealingly at her

"Why, no," replied the querulous, hesitating voice; "Enoch does all that, you know. That wouldn't make any difference."

"But we'll save you the turkey, tell your mother," volunteered Miss Mehitable, consolingly; "and one that'll just suit her." And she slipped a yellow pear into the child's

hand and another in her apron pocket, with a caraway cookey to keep it company.

And then, as the child ran home in the twilight, Miss Hetty called Enoch, and set the chairs around the table, and brought the little brown earthern tea-pot, steaming fragrantly, and the four sat down to tea. Rather a silent meal it was. The elder women were thinking of other years that had held "real Thanksgivings" for them, and Alice also, only she would not dwell on them. Her home would never echo again with the gladness of the home festival; her dear ones were scattered, and some were at rest! But she resolutely kept back such thoughts and the tears they stirred, and recalled a conversation she had had a few weeks ago with the lawyer who managed the bulk of the West property.

"It's growing fast," he said. “She doesn't touch now even the interest. The farm and the West Hill property more than keep her. You'd be surprised to know the new investments I've had to make for her within a few years. Oh! it isn't a fortune, of course; but for one poor, lone, old woman to have, with no earthly use for it, and to know, too, that the most of it was picked up among the rocks out on West Hill, thirty thousand seems considerable!"

"And, I suppose," Alice said to herself, "she will leave it all to that man Jotham West, who doesn't need it, will only hoard it, and is crazy with greed for it now. But how much good she might be doing all the time, and she doesn't know it!" And it was in pursuance of this thought that she said by and by, when supper was over, and she and Aunt Hetty were washing the dishes:

"I always have a specially strong desire to be rich, at holiday times. Even with a little to give, one could put so much brightness into people's lives. How many real Thanksgivings' one could help to make if one had but the dollars!' "Ah! child," sighed she of eighty years, "you don't know! Dollars don't make joys."

"But they help to buy them a great many times-if not for ourselves, then for others—and I should think that would be the best kind of consolation: to help comfort some one else." "I was reading the other day," she went on, turning to Miss Hetty, "something that Professor Henry Drummond saidhe that wrote the book we liked so much, 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World,'-about how large a part of His life on the earth Christ spent in making people happy; and if He thought it 'twas worth the while, why it must be what we want to do, too."

"It's the folks that make Thanksgiving, not the feast," resumed the old woman, drearily, after a pause.

"But lonely folks might help to make good times for other lonely or disheartened folks that were even worse off." It was Miss Mehitable who said this softly. "Yes," the widow answered, sighing again. "You're a good girl, Niece Hetty, and Alice means well; but she is young, young, you know. And I am so tired! I wish one of you would read the chapter now, and I would go to bed."

So Alice brought the old leather-covered Bible, from which even the Divine truth seemed sweeter and more precious than from other pages, and read, not consecutive verses only, but turning the leaves often and choosing portions-though, if her hearer noticed, she made no remark. Now it was from the Mosaic law:

"And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest; thou shalt leave them to the poor, and to the stranger: I am the Lord your God." "Thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother;

"But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him."
"For the poor shall never cease out of the land."

Then the more familiar New Testament words, "The poor always ye have with you," and kindred sayings of our Lord and His disciples, ending with the parable of the King, present in His sick and suffering ones, and saying at last to His servants at the judgment:

"Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye did it not to me."

"For," said Alice, "what would be right for a poor woman is not right for her. She is a good woman, but she seems to think she does her duty by her money and to her fellow-men by hoarding the one and letting alone the other. No wonder she is melancholy!"

"She is a good woman," answered Hetty; "a Christian woman-devout and believing. But she doesn't realize her stewardship, and perhaps none of us do; but, because she is a good woman, I think she will see things differently." "But when? The time cannot be long now."

"And it is sometimes very hard," went on Miss Hetty, grave and unheeding, "to keep our sorrows or disappointments from shutting the door between us and other people, instead of setting it wide open so that we may help them."

Was it any secret or special trouble that shadowed Miss Hetty's face? She had had trouble, Alice knew-yes, and her own disappointments to bear. Alice remembered that she had heard that people thought she had "been promised" to Theodore West, who was of another branch of the family. Something had intervened; the lover, if lover he had been, had gone away years before, and doubtless, if he were living, had home and wife and children of his own by this time. The old wound had evidently not healed, however; but how well Miss Hetty bore it! What a rare woman she was! If only she had Aunt Charity's thousands!

But Aunt Charity gave no sign, immediately, of any intended lavish distribution of her money in the benevolence her name betokened. Alice exercised her best recollection of Scripture-teaching to supplement that first lesson, and even secretly called Hetty to her assistance to choose or direct to appropriate readings. But the widow did not succumb, and did not show that she took the very plain hints given her by the young and zealous, if not Solomon-like, adviser; and the girl herself would have shrunk from dictation or officiousness, or any appearance of pertness.

Mrs. West was unusually silent for a few days thereafterwhether with sadness or with the maturing of a new and foreign idea, no one knew. Miss Hetty, too, seemed a little distrait. Was it in any way connected (her distraitness) with the rumor that Theodore West was coming back home for this Thanksgiving?-though a lonely Thanksgiving he would find it in the almost desolate homestead.

But a few days later Miss Hetty was recalled from these wistful memories, if such they were, to the present, with its duties, by her sad old aunt herself. It was while Alice was at school that the mistress of the household disclosed her purposes. Miss Hetty literally gasped with surprise as her aunt's plans were revealed to her; they went so far beyond any expectations of hers. But she recovered herself speedily, and the two had a long, absorbing conference.

"You see," said the Widow West, eagerly, "it is so late to begin, we must work all the faster. Ah! that is just like my life! It is so late to begin to do good!"

"It is not too late," returned Hetty, "and you are not beginning, for you began long ago. It is only going on farther and out into a larger place."

"I am glad we didn't promise Parker those turkeys, nor the chickens, either," rejoined the elder woman. "The flock of them isn't much to give, and it will be a comfort to send them off, one by one, with vegetables to go with them, and pies and things. You must make out the list to-day, Hetty, and

Original in Good Housekeeping.

IN THE SICK ROOM.—III.

THE ART OF NURSING.

sick person.

HEN it is possible to have a choice in the matter the largest and best room in the second story should be given up to the In summer the coolest should be selected, in winter the brightest and most sunny. If there is a standing basin in it the stopper should be put in, and that and the overflow holes firmly covered with plaster of paris. The plumbing may be perfect, but on the other hand it may not, and sewer gas is too dangerous an enemy to admit even the possibility of its presence into a room where a life and death conflict is to be waged. This risk should never be run for the sake of saving a little trouble to the nurses.

THE FLOOR.

A hard wood floor, or one of close fitting soft wood boards, well painted, is the ideal one for the sick room. It can be wiped every morning with a long handled mop wrung out of carbolized hot water and so kept always perfectly fresh and sweet. Only enough water should be used to dampen it and remove the dust; it need not be made wet. When a carpet is already down it cannot always be removed. It should be swept every day with a carpet sweeper to prevent the dust from rising into the air, or, if one cannot be had, with a damp cloth wrapped around a broom. The space under the bed should receive particular attention that no dust may lurk there.

THE WINDOWS.

These must be very carefully attended to, as the supply of pure air depends upon them, and if they cannot do their duty properly the loss is great. The one farthest from the bed should be kept constantly open at the top. If the upper sash is not arranged to let down, it can easily be made to do so by removing the cleats underneath it. It can then be kept in place by a stick reaching from one of the cross bars of the top of the window sash, the width of the opening being regulated by the length of the stick. This opening should be covered by a strip of flannel tacked on one side to the top of the window frame and on the other to the top of the sash. This will admit fresh air without a draught. If the window runs on cords a light frame may be made to fit in the opening and covered with flannel. In cold weather a board the exact width of the window and about three inches wide may be placed under the under sash. A stream of air will then flow into the room where the upper and under sash are separated. A green linen blind should be provided to darken the room when required and no draperies should be permitted to remain; they only accumulate dust and serve no good purpose. In extremely cold weather, when enough artificial heat cannot be secured to keep the room at a temperature of 68°, the window must be closed. In this case, several times in the day, the patient should be closely covered with extra blankets and the face protected while the window is thrown wide open for a few minutes. The extra coverings should be left on until the room is warm again. In a small room where the bed cannot be put out of a direct draught, the window in the hall, or in a communicating room, must furnish the ventilation.

THE FIRE.

plenished without noise. It can be poked more quietly with a short stick than with a poker. If fire irons are used, let them be secured beyond the possibility of coming down with the clatter that is well nigh overpowering to a well person. If the fuel is wood, let there be no soft sticks to spark and splutter. Where there is a fire-place, a lighted lamp can be set in it in summer, when a fire would make the room too warm; it should be kept burning day and night. When the room is heated by a close stove, a register, or a coil of hot water pipes, a metal dish filled with boiling water and placed where it will keep hot will moisten the atmosphere by the steam it gives off. The proper temperature at which the room should be kept varies with the nature of the disease. It is

lower for fevers than for diseases of the chest and throat. The doctor will usually mention the temperature he thinks best for the patient in question, and his orders should be strictly followed.

THE BED.

It is very tiring to stoop over a low bedstead in taking care of a sick person. The nurse cannot use her strength to advantage in moving and lifting, and her charge suffers in consequence. The best size is about two feet high by three feet wide. The most perfect bed for a long illness is a woven wire mattress with a soft hair one over it. This gives a firm yet elastic foundation which does not sink into holes. Soft twilled rubber sheeting can be purchased by the yard; a strip of this should be laid across the middle of the mattress and the ends firmly tucked under each side. The cotton sheet is put over this and tucked smoothly under the mattress on all sides. A sheet folded once lengthways is laid across the middle of the bed and pushed securely under the mattress on either side. This can be easily tightened, kept smooth and free from crumbs and changed more readily than the whole sheet. The upper sheet and one or two blankets are then put in place and secured at the foot. A thin white spread may be added if desired, but wadded quilts, or heavy coverings, should never be used about a sick bed. If there are involuntary discharges a square of rubber cloth should be folded in several thicknesses of old cotton and placed under the sufferer. Two or three should be provided and the rubber washed in carbolized water before being used again.

It is a simple matter to change the under sheet without removing the patient from bed if he can be moved ever so little. Have the clean sheet rolled to about half its width, that is, take hold of the side of the sheet and fold it towards the middle, lay it across a chair near by and move the patient to one side of the bed, folding the clothes back towards him, keeping him covered, push the soiled sheet towards him also, and on the half of the mattress thus exposed lay the clean sheet with the rolled part towards the patient, tuck the free edge under the mattress at the side, straighten the coverings over the bed and move the patient, under their shelter, over the roll on to the smooth part of the clean sheet; go around to the other side of the bed, pull off the soiled sheet, unroll the remainder of the clean sheet and tuck that side under the mattress. To change the upper sheet without exposing the invalid, lay the fresh one outside the bedclothes with a blanket over it, draw the other bedclothes from under it, either holding it in place with one hand, or pinning the upper corners to the pillows to keep it steady, the other bedclothes can then be spread over and the soiled sheet drawn from underneath.

THE FURNITURE.