University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
THANKSGIVING, OR NEW ENGLAND'S HOLIDAY.—MARGARET
HAS HER DIVERSION.

It is noticeable that we of the present age have fewer
holidays than our puritanical ancestors. “The King's
Birth Day” was formerly celebrated with great pomp; in
addition there were enjoyed “Coronation Days,” the
“Birth of a Prince,” Accessions and Burials of Governors,
Victories in War, Masonic Festivals, to say nothing of
Military Reviews, Election Days, Ordination of Ministers,
Executions for Murder; and at a still later period Washington's
Birth Day, now almost forgotten, and the Fourth
of July, at present diverted to a Sunday-school or Temperance
Festival. But of Thanksgiving; a day devoted to
mirth, gratefulness, hospitality, family love, eating, drinking;
a day sometimes externally snowy, drizzly, benumbing,
drenching; internally so elastic, smiling, lark-like, verdant,
blithe; it is not sanctified or squandered like Merry
Christmas in the Old World: it has no gooding, candles,
clog, carol, box, or hobby-horse; it has no poetry or song;
it does not come in the calendar, only by the Governor's
proclamation; New Englanders can sing with Old Englanders,
mutatis mutandis:—

They cannot add, —

Our houses and churches are brown and sear as the gardens
and orchards about them. The cedar may be green
in the woods, the box-tree, the fir and the pine together,
we never use them. In both cases, there is, or was, an
abundance of wassailing, dancing, gaming, shooting, and if
one pleases to say, “Heathenrie, Divelrie, Dronkennesse,
Pride.” We have no budding oak or holy-thorn, which
sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, and bears
milk-white blossoms every Christmas day, in the forests of
Glastonbury; although no doubt such trees might be found
in our woods. Unlike Christmas, bread baked Thanksgiving
Eve moulds never the slower. Yet, bating ecclesiastical
days and a few calendar superstitions, which the dissenting
Colonists left behind, how much did they not bring
with them from their native soil! “We owe,” says the
Democratic Review, “our political institutions, and nearly
all the arrangements of our public, social and domestic life,
to our English ancestors.” In addition to religion, language,
habits, costume, fashions, science, art, architecture,
agriculture, the military and naval art, horses, carriages,
cows, sheep, grass, bells, knives and forks, glass ware,
apples, etc., etc., there floated across the sea, and has descended
the stream of Time, idiosyncrasies of temper, idioms
of speech, rhetorical figures, colloquial metaphors, an entire
dialect of vulgarisms, ballads, madrigals, maxims, witticisms,

witchcraft, bigotry, omens, a thousand and one fanciful
calculations on the moon, the weather, beasts, birds,—a
whole argosy. Some of these may be traced to the Saxons
and Britons, in unbroken succession. They still exist in
England, Germany, Sweden, nay, every where. We must
look perhaps for some great Oriental centre, some fountain
head beyond the Indus. The fathers of the Sanscrit, the
authors of the Vedas, the original Brahmins, whoever they
may have been, possibly the step-sons of Noah, seem to
have given population, language, law, philosophy, superstition,
and, saving Christ, religion to the world.

John Bull and Brother Jonathan, a North Briton and a
Yankee, have the same flesh and blood, the same corpuscular
ingredients, the same inspiration of the Almighty.
The latter differs from the former chiefly in this, breadth;
his legs are longer and his feet larger, because he has
higher fences and steeper hills to climb, and longer roads
to travel; he is more lank because he has not time to
laugh so much, since it takes him so long to go to mill, to
pasture, and the neighbors; he is less succulent and oozy
because he gets dry and hardened in the extensive tracts
of open air he has to traverse; he is more suspicious because
in his circuits he meets with more strangers; he is
more curious for the same reason; he is more inventive and
calculating for this same breadth, having no aids at hand,
and depending entirely on himself; his eye is keener because
he sees his objects at a greater distance; he is more
religious because he has farther to go for his religion, that
is to say, to meeting; men valuing what costs them much;
—the whole difference is breadth, interminable forests,
rivers, mountains, platitudinous farms, families reaching
from the Madawaska to the Yazoo. The same cause operates
to distinguish the Kentucky hunter from the Yankee,

cypress swamps, alligators, catamounts, the Indians, the
Mississippi. Sam Slick is an elongated and skinny John
Browdie, and David Crockett is the same “critter,”
knobbed and gnarled.

Thanksgiving was an anti-Christmas festival, established
as a kind of off-set to that. Yet both are a fealty paid to
the universal gala sentiment. We cannot always work, we
cannot always pray. So say young and old, grave and gay.
Hence, Hindoo Doorga, Celtic Juul, Jewish Succoth, Japanese
Majira, the Panathenæa, Fete des Fous, Volks-fest,
Carnival, Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving.

Thanksgivings have been observed—what do we say?
The first Thanksgiving must have been of God's own ordaining
about the beginning of the new year 1621, that is
to say, the 25th of March, at New Plymouth, after a dismal
winter of destitution, disease and alarm, when the
snows were melting, and “brooks of sweet fresh water”
broke loose, the children found a new May-flower peeping
from the dead leaves, the buds of the dogwood began to
swell and the birds to sing, the “sick and lame recovered
apace,” and the Colonists saw something that looked like
living and home. The first Thanksgiving “by authority”
was, if we are agreed, June 13, 1632. We can hardly call
that a New England Thanksgiving, inasmuch as it embraced
but a handful of the people. The Indians must
have kept it as a Fast.

Thanksgivings were appointed for “the removal of sickness,”
“the precious life of our Sovereign;” “success of
the king of Prussia,” “the conquest of Martinico,” that
“God had been pleased to support our most gracious Queen
in the perils of childbirth,” “for success against the Indians,
so that scarce a name or family remain in their former
habitation,” “the suppression of rebellion in Great Britain,”

“the near view of peace.” Fasts, the antipodal holiday,
were proclaimed by reason of “the small-pox,” earthquakes,
inundations, and other calamities in Europe,”
“distressing Indian wars,” “that we may be preserved
against the rage of the heathen,” “the great number of
insects,” “drought,” “unseasonable rains,” “divisions in
our churches,” the “Ranters and Quakers,” “the low estate
of the people of God,” “some heathen yet in hostility,”
“the great distresses of Ministers, their salaries being paid
in depreciated paper.”

Thanksgiving was at hand for Livingston, the Pond,
Nimrod, Margaret. Its succedanea, as respects the latter,
were a turkey shoot the next day and a ball in the evening
at No. 4. If Margaret had lived in the village, or almost
any where else than the Pond, she might have enjoyed
the meeting of families, parents and children, grandparents
and grandchildren, uncles, cousins; she might
have united in the consumption of turkeys, chickens, plum-pudding,
pumpkin, mince and apple pies, beer, cider, flip;
she might have gone to church and heard a discourse from
Parson Welles on the distressing state of the times, and
the imminent danger from French influence, and learned
what a Philistine Napoleon Bonaparte was; she might
have gone to a party of boys and girls at Esq. Weeks's and
played “blind-man's buff,” “run round the chimney,” and
“button, button, who's got the button;” but she did not.
Yet she was quite busy at home. Two or three of the
preceding days she spent riding about with Nimrod to
invite company and arouse interest for the ball. They
went to Mr. Pottle's at Snake Hill, and Mr. Dunlap's at
Five-mile-lot, where they also encountered the camp
Preacher sedulously disputing the field with them. They
went also to the Ledge, where the Preacher followed.

But Mistress Palmer decided the question by saying that
Roderick, her oldest son, had professed a hope and would
not think of going, but that Rhody had not come forward at
all, and she thought the exercise would do her good, and
that Rufus, if he had been serious, had lost his impressions,
and it would not harm him to go.

Thanksgiving Eve was kept at the Pond in this wise:
their candles were pine torches, which they flourished about
the premises in pursuit of hens and turkeys; their clogs
were large clumps of bark crowded into the immense fireplace:
their carol consisted of oaths, smirks, songs; for ale
they had an abundance of cider brandy. No St. Nicholas
watched about the chimney during the night, or filled Margaret's
stocking in the morning. Who is the patron saint
of Thanksgiving? Only Chilion made her a present of a
beautiful blue-painted sled to coast with when the snows
came, and named Humming Bird. They had stewed chicken
and crust coffee for breakfast, and for dinner chickens
roasted by strings suspended before the fire, potatoes,
brown bread and cider. Pies and cakes were wanting.
The remainder of the time was occupied in preparing for
the events of the next day, scouring guns, polishing buckles,
and the like. Nimrod took occasion to renew his instructions
to Margaret in the dancing art, and Chilion intimated
some of his best tunes.

No. 4, to which the attention of the family was now directed,
lay in a valley below the Pond, formed by the passage
of Mill Brook, and was enriched by nature with fine
intervals and excellent drainages. The approach to the
place was by a narrow, woody, rocky road or lane. Here was
a large tavern, known as Smith's, and a distillery owned by
the same gentleman. In the language of a writer of the
times, this hamlet presented a spectacle of “houses without

windows, barns without roofs, gardens without enclosures,
fields without fences, hogs without yokes, sheep without
wool, meagre cattle, feeble horses, and half clad, dirty
children, without manners, principles or morals.” The
people were loungers about the tavern, which seemed to
have exhausted the life of the place, and to have diffused
over it instead, indolence, dreariness and sterility.

To this hamlet Nimrod bore Margaret, and Hash carried
his turkeys. The day was chilly and drizzling, and
Margaret was deposited in the kitchen of the tavern, where
she had a chance to become acquainted with Mr. Smith's
daughters, the Gubtailes, Hatchs, Tapleys, from the neighborhood,
Paulina Whiston, Grace Joy and Beulah Ann
Orff from Breackneck. The bar-room was filled with men
and boys, fumes of rum and tobacco, and a jargon of voices;
the air about was charged with the smoke of powder;
there were the report of rifles, the running to and fro of
men and boys, disputes about the shots, wrangling, and wrestling;
in all which Margaret had no share. Thus passed
the fore part of the day.

In the evening, Nimrod, as one of the masters of arrangements,
with Margaret, came early to the tavern.
Soon the ladies and gentlemen began to assemble. Of the
number were Pluck and his wife, the Widow Wright and
Obed, and Sibyl Radney. Abel Wilcox, the clerk, and
Hancock Welles, grandson of the Parson, from the village,
constituted the principal loafers. The hall was a
long unfinished upper room, having its naked timbers and
sleepers garnished with pine and hemlock. Tallow candles
in wooden blocks effected a rude illumination. The
ladies' dresses presented considerable variety; some had
made requisition on the wardrobes of their grandmothers,
some had borrowed from their neighbors, servants from

their mistresses; in a few appeared the latest style of the
cities; several wore gowns of their own manufacture, striped
or checked linen, with flowers elaborately wrought with the
needle. There were sacques, trails, and one or two hoops.
All had necklaces of gold, glass, or waxen beads. The
coiffures were equally diversified, consisting of tye-tops,
crape cushions, toupees, sustained and enriched with brass
and gilt clasps, feathers and flowers. Their shoes were
striped with a white welt. There was an agreeable inter-mixture
of old and faded brocades, rustling padusoys, and
shining lutestrings. Many wore ear hoops of pinch-beck,
large as a dollar.

The gentlemen exhibited a similar blending of old and
new patterns. If Joseph's coat of many colors had been
miraculously enlarged, and cut into separate garments, it
would form the appropriate suit of this assemblage, in which
red, blue, yellow, chocolate, butternut, green, and all hues
but black, were represented. Their hair was powdered,
and done in tyes, queues, frizzes. Margaret wore the
new dress Nimrod brought her, and her moccasons.
Pluck retained his leather apron, his wife had donned
a clean long-short. Chilion, the chief musician, had on
a pearl-colored coat, buff swansdown vest, white worsted
breeches and ribbed stockings. Tony Washington, the
negro barber from the village, and assistant violinist,
appeared in powdered hair, a faded crimson silk coat, ruffle
cuffs and white smalls. It was a singularly freaked and
speckled group. There were burly, weather-beaten faces
under powder and curls; broad, hard hands in kid gloves;
thewy, red elbows that had plied brooms, shuttles, cards, in
lace ruffles; there were bright eyes, smiling faces and many
pleasant words.

Chilion, whose general manner was reserved and obscure,

grew animated as the dance began. Margaret, omitted
at first, was presently called up by Rufus Palmer. None
were so young and small as she; but she enacted her part
with vigor and precision. Her father asked her for a
partner, and it gave her new life when she saw she pleased
him. She was, for the most part, among strangers, in a
strange place and strangely occupied. The lights, the
open fantastically shadowed garret above, the evergreens,
the windows shining with the dew of so many breaths, the
mystic motion, steps which one takes and comprehends not,
balancing, gallopading, confusion harmonized, oiled intricacies,
plough-boys graceful and boors mannerly, earnestness
of participation, so earnest that even in the height of the
sport no one smiles; and then more than this, the
clear, exhilarating, penetrating notes of the violin, and
Chilion's violin, that she always loved to hear, played in
its best way; the life of all this life, the motion of this motion,
the inspirer and regulator of this maze,—as to all
these things, she felt grateful to her brother, and for the
rest, she seemed to enjoy it with a deep unconsciousness of
joy.

One might have noticed her brother Chilion peculiarly
employed. He not only controlled the action, but
seemed to gratify himself in varying and modifying it. He
evidently fantasied with the company. He made them
move faster or slower as he pleased. He might have been
seen watching the effect of his viol, or his own effect through
it. Whatever power he possessed he exerted to the utmost.
He seemed to be playing more upon the dancers than upon
his instrument. In the midst of a figure he would accelerate
the parties, and whirl them to the end with frantic
rapidity and bewildering intent. In a contra-dance, to the
“Campbells are Coming,” never did plaided Highlander

leap down his native rocks with more headlong step than
those same pied bumpkins sprang over that hall floor. He
slackened the motion at the close, and dismissed them quietly
to their seats. In one of the intermissions might have
been seen entering the place the indefatigable Preacher.
He stole through the crowd, erected his tall dark form on
a bench, and taking advantage of the pause, broke upon
them like a thunder gust. His loud, guttural, solemn voice
rang through the room:—

“Thus saith the Lord God, thy pomp shall be brought
down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols!”

“A sermon! a sermon!” cried Abel Wilcox.

Preacher. “You look fair and seemly, but you are
stench in the nostrils of the Almighty.”

Crowd. “Another set, who'll lead off?”

Preacher. “The Lord will take away the bravery of
your tinkling ornaments, your cauls and round tires like
the moon, your chains and bracelets and mufflers.”

Pluck. “Let us praise God in the dance, praise him
with the stringed instrument. Let us, as David did, dance
before the Lord.”

Preacher. “This place shall be as God overthrew Sodom
and Gomorrah; owls shall dwell here, and satyrs shall
dance here.”

Crowd. “Peggy and Molly!” “The Haymakers,”
“Here's Zenas Joy and Delinda Hoag want `Come haste
to the Wedding!'”

Preacher. “You stand on slippery places, your feet
shall stumble on the dark mountains.”

Crowd. “Chorus Jig! Hoa! Chilion!”

Chilion. “Take your partners.”

The words of the Preacher, as not unusually happens,
were disregarded. He pitched his voice still higher. They

danced the faster, Chilion played with the greater energy.
The Preacher himself, exhausted or discouraged, became at
length a listener, and finally his eye was riveted to the
scene before him. Chilion played on almost wildly. Tony
seconded the purposes of his master to the best of his endeavors,
his teeth and eyes shone with a terrified whiteness,
and the powder from his hair ran in chalky streams down
his face. Chilion was unmoved in the storm he raised.
Curls uncurled, ruffles were ruffled, trains trailed; but
the game went on. Margaret revelled in the movement;
she danced as to the winds; she knew her brother, she
loved his power, she leaped out his spirit and tones. She
sprang through the figure like a shuttle, she spun round
and round like a top. Chilion, in his own time, softened
the measure, and suffered the piece to glide away in the
gentlest pulsations. The night waxed and waned. The
Preacher and spectators had gone; most of the dancers left.

Here we must recede a moment to relate that in the
forenoon, Hash, the brother of Margaret, and Zenas Joy, a
resident of the place called Breakneck, had a serious misunderstanding
about a shot the latter made at a turkey set
up by the former. Numbers came forward to the arbitration,
and in the result it happened that the interests and
jealousies of all parties became joined in issue, and the
strength and prowess of the several neighborhoods were
marshalled under the respective standards of the Pond and
Breakneck. It was proposed to adjust the difficulty by a
champion from each side in a wrestling match. A rain,
however, separated the combatants, and broke up the ring.
At the supper-table in the evening, the subject was renewed.
Again at this late hour of the night, there were not
wanting causes to stimulate the feud in such as remained.
Mr. Smith, the tavern-keeper, brought forward a fresh

supply of liquors, of which both gentlemen and ladies
freely drank; and the two young men from the village had
no other business than to foment and egg on the rivalships
or the several districts. A final dance was called for; but
there appeared little self-possession either in respect of
temper or limb. Chilion played a while, and then relinquished
his instrument. Zenas Joy seized Hash by the
collar; Joseph Whiston tripped Obed, who, poor youth,
was already nearly down with liquor; Abel Wilcox spurred
Rufus Palmer to tread on Beulah Ann Orff's trail; Grace
Joy taunted Nimrod with a false step Margaret had taken;
Sibyl Radney rushed into the fray, pounced upon Zenas
Joy, and sent him whirling about the room, as she would a
spinning wheel. So one and another were engaged. Margaret,
who had left the floor, was standing by the side of
Chilion. She looked at the quarrellers, and then at her
brother. He snapped his viol strings, and was silent.

“Sing, Margery,” at length he said. He began a
familiar tune, “Mary's Dream,”—he played and she sang.
This twofold melody, sweet and plaintive, seemed to touch
the hearts of those excited people. They stopped to hear,
they heard to be won. They moved towards the music;
they were hushed if not subdued, they parted in peace if
not in harmony. Thus ended their Thanksgiving, and we
must end ours, and turn to other times and scenes.